Literary Criticism and

Cultural Theory

Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College

A Routledge Series
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
William E. Cain, General Editor

Postmodernism and Its Others Revisiting Vietnam

The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Memoirs, Memorials, Museums
and Don DeLillo Julia Bleakney
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Equity in English Renaissance
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Journalism in American Modernist Prose Thomas More and Edmund Spenser
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Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces “You Factory Folks Who Sing This
The Early United States through the Rhyme Will Surely Understand”
Lens of Travel Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia
Jeffrey Hotz Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and
Olive Dargan
“Like Parchment in the Fire” Wes Mantooth
Literature and Radicalism in the
English Civil War “Visionary Dreariness”
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Sublime
Between the Angle and the Curve Markus Poetzsch
Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity
in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison Fighting the Flames
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Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American
Writings of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Idioms of Self-Interest
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William Faulkner Renaissance Literature
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The Spell Cast by Remains Machine and Metaphor

The Myth of Wilderness in Modern The Ethics of Language in American Realism
American Literature Jennifer Carol Cook
Patricia A. Ross
“Keeping Up Her Geography”
Strange Cases Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space in
The Medical Case History and the Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and
British Novel Culture
Jason Daniel Tougaw Tanya Ann Kennedy
 “Keeping Up Her Geography”
Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space in
Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

Tanya Ann Kennedy

I~ ~~o~;~;n~~;up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
“The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism: Gender and Agrarianism in Glasgow’s Barren Ground, Tanya
Ann Kennedy © 2006 by the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department of English. Reprinted with permission.

Excerpts from Vein of Iron, copyright 1935 by Ellen Glasgow and renewed 1963 by First and Merchants Bank of
Richmond Virginia, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

Excerpts from Barren Ground, copyright 1925, 1933 by Ellen Glasgow and renewed 1953, 1961 by First and Mer‑
chants National Bank of Richmond, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

Excerpts throughout as submitted in the request from DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD by ZORA NEALE HUR‑
STON. Copyright 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston; renewed (c) 1970 by John C. Hurston. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.

First published 2007 by Routledge

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2007 Taylor & Francis

The Open Access version of this book, available at [Link],

has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

ISBN: 9780415979498 (hbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data

Kennedy, Tanya Ann.

“Keeping up her geography” : women’s writing and geocultural space in twentieth century
U.S. literature and culture / by Tanya Ann Kennedy.
p. cm. ‑‑ (Literary criticism and cultural theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97949‑8 (alk. paper)
1. American literature‑‑Women authors‑‑History and criticism. 2. American
literature‑‑20th century‑‑History and criticism. 3. Women and literature‑‑United
States‑‑History‑‑20th century. 4. Feminism and literature‑‑United States. 5. Feminist
theory. 6. Space in literature. 7. Sex role in literature. 8. Women‑‑United States‑‑Social
conditions. I. Title. II. Series.

PS151.K46 2006
810.9’92870904‑‑dc22 2006024257
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Chapter One
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 1

Chapter Two
Journeys into Urban Interiors 25

Chapter Three
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 71

Chapter Four
Bitter Locations: Self-Representation, Gender, and Nation 111

Conclusion 157

Notes 161

Works Cited 171

Index 179

v
Acknowledgments

In ways large and small, many people have contributed to this project. First,
this project could not have been finished without the patient guidance pro-
vided by my dissertation advisor Susan Lurie who always made the time
to read chapter after chapter, again and again. Helena Michie and Allison
Sneider, as members of my dissertation committee, provided many help-
ful suggestions for the manuscript. I would also like to thank Scott Derrick
and Elizabeth Klett for reading and commenting on chapter two. Generally,
many members of the Rice faculty were very helpful to me during my time
there—Susan, Helena, and Lynne Huffer, particularly; my scholars’ group
helped me keep deadlines and gave me a helpful forum for discussing the
perils of writing and teaching; and Marc Tipton offered much appreciated
emotional support and a good time always. Finally, I would like to thank
my family, especially my mother, for being understanding and supportive
throughout my education.

vii
Chapter One
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide

In her essay, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” Carol

Pateman argues that “[t]he dichotomy between the private and the public
is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle;
it is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about” (118). Most political
theorists see the origins of the public/private divide in the modern nation-
state and industrial capitalism; men became citizens and workers in the pub-
lic sphere and assumed authority over women and children in the private
realm of the family. Thus, feminist theorists have traditionally understood
the binary as key to women’s exclusion from citizenship and their subordi-
nation in the home. As Pateman argues, feminist theorists have challenged
this gendered divide, as well as critiquing Marxist and liberal political theo-
ries of the modern nation-state that ignore gender. These feminist critiques
have demonstrated that the public and private are mutually constitutive, that
gender is a key organizing principle of the binary, and that the “personal is
political.”
More recently, feminist scholars have debated the usefulness of the
public/private divide as a framework for analysis.1 However, both this debate
and traditional feminist critiques of the divide have been mostly neglected in
feminist U.S. literary studies, because these feminist critics tend to focus more
on the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres. But just as feminist
theorists in other disciplines debate whether or not to use the public/private
as a framework for analysis, some critics in U.S. studies have called for an
end to the use of separate spheres as a model for analyzing gender relations.
Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher’s No More Separate Spheres!
is an extended argument against using separate spheres as a framework for
analyzing gender relations in nineteenth-century U.S. culture. The authors
also want to rid American Studies of separate spheres criticism, feminist criti-
cism devoted to the study of women as a separate category of analysis. When

1
2 Keeping Up Her Geography

Davidson and Hatcher trace separate spheres theory through literary and his-
torical models, they tend to focus on a generalized view of separate spheres
criticism as essentialist and to conflate this view with the public/private
binary.2 This leads to the neglect of significant feminist work challenging the
binary and a repetition of arguments that have been theorized in feminist
work not situated squarely within the field of U.S. literature.
As Davidson and Hatcher note, they are not alone in calling for an end
to a use of the separate spheres model in feminist analysis. Many of these
critics seem to see the doctrine of separate spheres not as a specific historical
and cultural manifestation of the public/private divide, but as merely another
dualism in a long list of dualisms. Davidson and Hatcher argue that

[w]ithin the rigid logic of separate spheres, the originary organizing

binary of male/female on which the concept is grounded aligns and
affiliates with any number of other dualities: woman/male, femininity/
masculinity, emotion/reason, sentiment/logic, domesticity/politics,
private/public and so on. (20)

Here, it seems to be the use of the separate spheres model—feminists’ liter-

ary and historical analysis of women—that generates the binary of public/
private. The assumption is that any use of a binary model must necessarily
adhere to the binary logic of the model itself. Moreover, the authors make no
specific distinction between separate spheres—a binary that uses gender as
its specific organizing principle—and the public-private binary—a Western
cultural model that tends to make the politics of gender invisible. Therefore,
they cannot provide a complex historical account of how these two binaries
operate in relation to one another.
This dismissal of the gendered ideologies of the public/private binary
may be the result of the authors’ inattention to the complexity of feminist
critics’ analysis of how the public/private binary reproduces women’s inequal-
ity in the United States. For example, Davidson and Hatcher footnote, rather
than discuss, the numerous scholars who, throughout the 80s and 90s, cri-
tiqued the use of the separate spheres model, but they also neglect work by
feminist scholars who analyze the ideology of public/private in the United
States and its effects. In the following analysis, I focus on two examples of
this scholarship that complicate Davidson and Hatcher’s notion that femi-
nist criticism can easily move beyond the gendered binaries that structure
U.S. dominant culture. These examples suggest that there may be problems
with feminists arguing that they are done with a dominant ideology, such as
the public/private binary, when it is not done with women.
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 3

In bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” she describes the effects

that separate spheres ideology can have on black families who attempt to
conform to this ideology without the economic and racial privilege that the
ideology assumes: “Imagine if you will this young black couple struggling
first and foremost to realize the patriarchal norm (that is of the woman stay-
ing home, taking care of the household and children while the man worked)
even though such an arrangement meant that economically, they would
always be living with less” (28). Hooks reminds readers that ideologies may
not reflect reality, but they do have real effects, and those effects can be per-
sonally and socially destructive.
Similarly, Angela Davis in “Outcast Mothers and Surrogates: Racism
and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties” points to the damaging effects
of the “privatization of family responsibilities” in the contemporary United
States. The privatization reflected in the public/private binary described by
hooks has not lessened in contemporary life, but, according to Davis, has
increased as the state refuses to provide the necessary social and healthcare
services that make it possible for women to exercise their reproductive rights.
Davis argues that we must reconceive “family and reproductive rights in terms
that move from the private to the public, from the individual to the social”
(484). Far from seeing the genderedness of the public/private dichotomy as
an obsolete fiction that, if it applied at all, only applied to middle-class white
women in the nineteenth century, hooks and Davis articulate the damaging
effects of this ideology for women of color and poor white women.
The arguments of hooks and Davis point to the disabling effects of the
public/private binary in contemporary culture. But Davidson and Hatcher
ignore these effects, or rather, seem to attribute them to feminist criticism
itself. Yet feminist critique has been instrumental in challenging how this
division shapes what we define as politically, historically, economically, and
culturally significant and in showing how ideologies of the public/private in
the modern nation-state have been constitutive of our imagining of citizen-
ship. The more important work may be reappropriating and building on this
long tradition to better understand how feminist challenges might compli-
cate and refocus critical studies of U.S. culture.
The public/private binary has been challenged most thoroughly in the
writing of contemporary feminist political theorists. The most powerful of
these challenges have come from feminist critiques of liberal notions of the
individual. First, political theorists argue that the “individual” established
through the public/private binary is imagined as abstract, disembodied, and
sexless, primarily concerned with pursuing self-interest without the intru-
sion of the state. Second, these same theorists have argued that the liberal
4 Keeping Up Her Geography

state has in fact always intervened in the private sphere.3 This contradiction,
rather than undermining the logic of the public/private binary actually helps
to support it. As Nicola Lacey argues, “The ideology of the public/private
dichotomy allows government to clean its hands of any responsibility for the
state of the ‘private’ world and depoliticizes the disadvantages which inevitably
spill over the alleged divide by affecting the position of the ‘privately’ disad-
vantaged in the ‘public’ world” (qtd. in Boyd 97). While the state intervenes
in the “private,” the rhetoric of the “private” can also be a mechanism of
disablement; in this analysis the public/private binary is not merely another
binary to be done away with, but is a framework drawn so as to reproduce its
own organization. Therefore, pointing out that the public and private realms
are in fact implicated in one another is not enough; how they are implicated
in one another is the problem.
Moreover, feminists have pointed out the ambiguity of the binary.
Pateman, Nina Yuval-Davis, Ruth Lister, and Judith Squires (among oth-
ers) all indicate the extent to which the binary is destabilized by its own
ambiguity, and argue that this is its power, inasmuch as it allows dominant
ideologies to prevail. Most of these theorists, however, have themselves
different ways of defining the public/private binary. The most salient
point of their revision of the binary is their recognition that there are
actually two realms to which the private refers; it can refer to the domes-
tic (familial realm) or to the social realm (civil society). Classical liberal
theorists and contemporary political theorists have been less than precise
in articulating the difference this distinction makes. However, feminists,
long concerned with the relation between the domestic and the political,
see this as a significant oversight, because it means that the domestic actu-
ally holds a more ambiguous place in classical liberal theory than has been
recognized.
As Judith Squires indicates, in most political theorists’ discussions of
the public/private binary, it is civil society—the social and economic—that
represents the private realm in which individuals pursue their own interests
and the public is the state. The home is ignored. In most discussions of sepa-
rate spheres, feminists have tended to see the home-domestic-family as the
private and the public as the sphere of the political, the economic, and the
social. But if the home has no place in classical theory, if the private actually
refers to the marketplace and to the civil realm, then this split—much more
so than the public/domestic split—reveals the extent to which the public/
private binary depends on the individual abstracted from relations with oth-
ers. However, feminists, drawing on Habermas, have pointed to the social
realm as a third arena that mediates between the public and private realms.
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 5

The recognition of this third realm is an important critical tool for feminists’
critique of dominant conceptions of the binary.
Recognition of this third term also points to a need to rethink how
separate spheres has been understood in feminist critiques of its use as an
analytical model. Many feminist critics tend to reify separate spheres ideol-
ogy as a rigid spatial separation of men and women. For example, Karen
Hansen, in “Rediscovering the Social,” examining working-class women’s
diaries from the mid-nineteenth century, argues that it “seems absurd to
describe the lives of the women I have studied, with their bustling rounds of
varied activities and wide-ranging interactions, as private in any meaningful
sense of the term” (291) and that these women were “out and about in the
social sphere, hardly confined to their domiciles” (292). However, it seems a
false reading of the doctrine of separate spheres to assume that it mandated
a strict spatial segregation of men and women. Nor does this reading of the
public/private binary take into account that within this ideology there is no
clear distinction between the domestic and the social in its representation of
women’s sphere. For example, in Jonathan F. Stearns’ “Female Influence, and
the True Christian Mode of Its Exercise” (1837), the minister attempts to
prevent female congregants from speaking out against slavery by reminding
them of their social duties: “But the influence of woman is not limited to the
domestic circle. Society is her empire, which she governs almost at will. . . .
The cause of benevolence is peculiarly indebted to the agency of woman.”
He then defines women’s special duties as caring for the sick, the orphaned,
and “lighten[ing] the burden of human misery” (Stearns 47). Stearns’ ser-
mon highlights the extent to which separate spheres ideology is implicated
in many of the major cultural debates of the nineteenth century, calling into
question whether contemporary feminist scholars can afford to ignore its
pervasiveness. But it also highlights the necessity of rethinking how feminist
critics have represented the public/private binary in their debates about sepa-
rate spheres ideology.
Joan Landes asks two astute questions about the debate over the pub-
lic/private binary: “Has the public/private division been mistaken for the
Victorian model of separate spheres? Is the public/private a spatial, symbolic,
or rhetorical construct?” (28). My response to both of these questions is yes.
Within U.S. cultural studies, the public/private binary and its construction
of gender inequality has been both generalized beyond its specific historical
and cultural context and narrowly redefined in terms of middle-class wom-
en’s domestic confinement and segregation from the public world of men.
My argument rejects both the generalization of separate spheres ideol-
ogy to include second wave feminist criticism and the reification of separate
6 Keeping Up Her Geography

spheres as a strict division of men and women into the realms of public and
private. I argue that feminist theorists’ recent attempts to rearticulate how the
public/private divide operates through gender show that this line of investi-
gation remains a politically and theoretically productive line of thought for
understanding women’s challenges to the divide, and for understanding how
it has been constitutive of women’s subordination.
In this project, I build on the insights of those theorists who argue
that the social realm as a third term can be usefully incorporated into femi-
nist challenges to the public/private binary, that the concepts of public and
private are “protean” terms, and that such terms need definition within spe-
cific contexts.4 In agreement with Karen Hansen, I argue that not only is the
social realm a key third term in analyzing the public/private divide, but that
it mediates between the public and private. However, I do not define the
social realm in the same way as Hansen. She defines the social as “informal
interaction in everyday life” (269). I argue that the social is a gendered con-
cept and a key site of women’s subordination in U.S. culture.
The social realm does act as mediating realm, but women are the pri-
mary representatives of this mediation. I argue in this chapter that the pub-
lic/private dichotomy is managed through a gendered ideology that requires
women—historically white middle-class women—to mediate between these
two realms and that this mediation is a site of subordination that the public/
private dichotomy works to obscure. As Stuart Hall argues, dominant ideolo-
gies narrowly construe the political realm and, in fact, to define an issue—as
many “women’s issues” are defined—as a “social problem” is a political act
in itself meant to subordinate the social to both the private and the political
realms, and to assign identities associated with such “problems” to a subordi-
nate place in the nation-state.
As I noted above, Stearns’ sermon reminds us that women were key
actors in the social realm in the nineteenth century and that separate spheres
rhetoric operates in the major debates about slavery, race, citizenship, and
labor that occurred during the century. And as Leonore Davidoff points out,
“ ‘Racial’ and national identity have extended or overtaken gender as a focus
of historical analysis, issues where the separate spheres approach seems irrel-
evant-although, in fact, the division between public and private, as a central
part of Western culture, has been a key factor in the imposition-and attrac-
tion-of colonial encounters”(11). In other words, the public/private dichot-
omy is embedded in the structural organizing of culture at every level; and in
the nineteenth century one can see separate spheres ideology operating as a
key mechanism for organizing U.S. culture. As I argue in the second section
of this chapter, far from acting as a “disincentive” to discussing the relation
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 7

between home and nation separate spheres rhetoric is central to nineteenth-

century women’s critique of how dominant ideologies of the public/private
divide construct citizenship.5
Finally, I argue that analyzing early twentieth-century women’s
challenges to various versions of the public/private divide will help open
up the debate in U.S. literary studies to an understanding of the rela-
tion between material and cultural spaces and the public/private divide.
The contemporary reification of separate spheres discussed here assumes a
somewhat simplistic relation between ideology and social space. Feminist
geographers’ understanding of the public/private binary can help feminist
theorists reconsider this relation. Gillian Rose in Feminism and Geography
(1993) traces feminist geography’s interest in the public/private divide as
a divide between reproduction (the private home) and production (pub-
lic). This traditional understanding of the divide is much more similar to
Davidson and Hatcher’s understanding of the separate spheres binary as
a (spatial) home/work division. However, in the 1980s, feminist geogra-
phers complicated this model in ways similar to political feminists: first,
pointing to the home as a social location, as the site of social reproduction
(rather than as the site of biological reproduction only) rather than as pri-
vate; and, then, pointing to the home as a site of labor, and recognizing
that the home/work divide cannot adequately account for the construc-
tion of gender in relation to other categories of identity such as race and
class.
My interest in recontextualizing the public and private in terms of
the relation between different geocultural spaces, or what geographers call
spatial scales, comes, in part, from reading Doreen Massey’s Space, Place,
and Gender. Massey, like many contemporary geographers, argues that the
“geography of power relations in spatial form is an important element in
the constitution of power itself ” (22). Thus, power can be renegotiated
through geographical strategies that deconstruct spatial ideologies and
by the placing of “phenomena in relationship to one another in such a
way that new social effects are provoked” (4). Contemporary geographers,
such as Massey, have worked to make this connection between geography
and power central to current interdisciplinary debates about history and
culture, focusing on the ways in which space and concepts of space are
both products of and producers of social organization. Therefore, if femi-
nists focus on spaces other than the generalized home/work dichotomy
or the even more generalized notion of the public/private divide, then
spaces become historical and cultural sites implicated in the construction
of these binaries but not reducible to those binaries.
8 Keeping Up Her Geography

The high visibility of emerging and intersecting (re)definitions of key

spatial concepts—the nation, the urban, the regional, and the domestic—in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provides a crucial context
for understanding how the public/private binary has been constructed and
contested, and why it operates so forcefully to reproduce gender inequal-
ity. It is in this period that we can most clearly trace how challenging this
binary has been central to feminist reconstructions of citizenship, of self-
hood, the body, and the relation between what Massey calls different spatial
scales. These concepts have been central to U.S. feminist and literary studies,
and, in each chapter, I show how these early feminist reconstructions often
call into question contemporary cultural critics’ understandings of the pub-
lic/private binary.
In the section that follows, I show how elite late nineteenth-century
women use the rhetoric of separate spheres to dismantle it and to argue for
a new definition of citizenship based on the mutually constitutive character
of the private, social, and public. To further develop the relation between
contemporary feminist perspectives on the public/private binary and the
nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres as a site of analysis, I turn
to conceptions of the public/private binary in late nineteenth-century cul-
ture as they were constructed through the World’s Columbian Exposition
of 1893 and in The World’s Congress of Representative Women held at the
Exposition. Listening to what women of the Exposition have to say about
the relation between public and private allows us to see how this crucial dis-
tinction shaped women speakers’ conception of citizenship, the individual,
and gender. The Congresses offer an ideal site for understanding how late
nineteenth-century women understood the public/private dichotomy, and
its significance to the struggle for economic independence and suffrage.
The Columbian Exposition also allows us to compare the represen-
tative women’s definition of citizenship and “Americanism” to other par-
ticipants’ definition of these terms. In the following pages, I first look at
how the Woman’s Building’s placement in the landscape of the exposition
grounds is symbolic of EuroAmerican women’s positioning within Western
culture; then, I discuss the relation between civilization, citizenship and the
women speakers’ articulation of the need for women’s suffrage, compar-
ing their notions of the American individual with masculine ideologies of
Americanism. Throughout, I focus on the ways in which they seek to chal-
lenge their symbolic place in Western culture by reconfiguring dominant
ideologies of public and private. Any understanding of their arguments will
lead necessarily to questions of difference, exclusion, and the suppression
of conflict—but this does not mean that we should ignore the oppositional
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 9

stance that separate spheres allowed women to take against the male politi-
cal establishment. Recognizing the Congress as a form of what Nancy Fraser
calls “a strong public” (recognizing the existence of multiple publics that are
sometimes in opposition to the state) does not allow us to ignore the state’s
ability to define the political. Recognizing the ways in which the Congress
is sometimes complicit with the project of nation-building should not lead
us to abandon wholesale the usefulness of the speakers’ complaint against
masculine political, social, and economic structures. If we marginalize their
opposition to what they themselves term “masculine culture,” then we may
fail to see how late nineteenth-century debates about gender and civilization
can usefully illuminate why the public/private dichotomy and feminists’ the-
orizing of this dichotomy should have a more central place in contemporary
American Studies. Indeed, the debates at the end of the late nineteenth cen-
tury may share more structural similarities with contemporary debates about
gender than Davidson and Hatcher allow for, and it is those similarities that
may lead us to usefully explicate how the public/private binary still matters.

I. PUTTING WOMEN ON THE MAP? THE WOMAN’S BUILDING

IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD’S COLUMBIAN
EXPOSITION

The Exposition’s architecture and its mapping of exhibits and buildings

spatially manifested the historical evolution of civilization. Its spatial design
explicitly pointed to Western culture as the endpoint of that historical
evolution and the United States as its apex. This view of the fair’s organization
has become a truism. For example, Alan Trachtenberg, in The Incorporation of
America, argues that the fair’s spatial design functioned as metarepresentation:
not merely representing the past and the model future, but embodying in its
design the importance of space to the ordering and organizing of cultures:

The Court of Honor provided the center around which the rest of
White City was organized in hierarchical degree; indeed, the carnival
atmosphere of the Midway Plaisance confirmed by contrast the dignity
of the center. And, of course, the center represented America through its
exhibitions, the outlying exotic Midway stood for the rest of the world
in subordinate relation. (213)

One of the more controversial aspects of the fair became one of its most
popular destinations: the Woman’s Building. It was the smallest building on
the main fairgrounds with the exception of the Administration Building, but,
10 Keeping Up Her Geography

to the Board of Lady Managers, and to many women, the building and its
contents were proof of women’s independent achievement. With the excep-
tion of the actual construction, it was solely the work of the women—from
the installations and the hastily constructed rooftop restaurant to the design
of the building itself. Although some women felt the Woman’s Building rep-
resented a marginalization of the achievements of women (many artists ini-
tially refused to show their work there), an overwhelming number of women
responded to and participated in the building’s success—even if the compli-
ments directed toward the building were rather backhanded. For instance,
Candace Wheeler described the building as “a man’s ideal of woman—deli-
cate, dignified, pure, and fair to look upon.” In a similar fashion, a reporter
described the building as “chaste and timid” (qtd. in Weimann 262). In this
way, the building itself came to represent the tensions that plagued women
organizers’ attempt to assert a public identity for women at the fair, one that
appealed to the majority but challenged the marginalization of women’s
work.
Another significant aspect of the Woman’s Building did not go unno-
ticed. In popular Christian novelist Clara Burnham’s novel Sweet Clover:
A Romance of the White City (1893), one of her characters describes her
emergence from the Midway Plaisance in these terms: “You come out o’
that mile-long babel . . . you pass under a bridge—and all of sudden
you are in a great beautiful silence. The angels on the Woman’s Building
smile down and bless you, and you know that in what seemed like one step
you’ve passed out o’ darkness and into the light” (qtd. in Weimann 257).
Burnham may have been the first to note that fair designers had placed
the Woman’s Building at the far end of the Exhibition grounds proper and
adjacent to the Midway, with its pseudo-ethnological displays of indige-
nous peoples from Africa and the Americas and its carnivalesque atmo-
sphere of primitive cultures as spectacle against which Americans could
measure their own civilization.
Contemporary scholars have also noted the building’s placement.
Robert Rydell interprets its positioning in this way:

the Woman’s Building was located in the northwest corner of the White
City, at the Gateway to the Midway Plaisance, the mile-long avenue that
combined amusement with ethnological instruction about people who
were typed as exotic or savage. . . . Looking up at the angels on the
Woman’s Building, Burnham’s fictional fairgoers could feel elevated by
the progress they had made from the chaos associated with the Midway
to the order symbolized by the White City.
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 11

There was, of course, another message in this ideologically laden map-

ping of the exposition grounds. If the position of the Woman’s Build-
ing right at the doorstep of the Midway was any indication, women, in
the eyes of the exposition’s male sponsors, came close to slipping into
the category of ‘otherness’ reserved for ‘savages’ and ‘exotics.’ They were
redeemed only by their capacity to serve as mothers of civilization—a
stereotype that some upper- and middle-class white women were only
too happy to embrace to advance their own reform agenda. As a result,
women’s representation at the World’s Columbian Exposition recapitu-
lated and reinforced prevailing sentiments of white supremacy. (Rydell
156–57)6

Rydell’s assessment of the building’s placement is the most compelling of

the numerous interpretations that writers—beginning with Burnham—have
brought to the building’s placement and its figural representation of woman-
hood, but he misses—as do most critics—the overriding influence of Chris-
tianity in Western women’s conception of both their maternal citizenship
and their international feminist citizenship, the meaning uppermost in the
passage from Burnham. If the geography of the world was manifest at the
fair as an evolutionary map of man’s rise from primitive man to republican
citizen, then this placement of the Woman’s Building also made woman’s
place in the historical map clear: Western women’s role as citizens was clearly
to mediate between the primitive and the civilized spots on the map as Chris-
tian citizens, and their ability to do so, was, indeed, as woman after woman
reminded the audiences of the Congress, a measure of that nation’s progress.
And, if white Western women had always used this mediating position to
negotiate between the private world of home and the social needs of the
nation, they were now using this position as a basis to claim their rights as
citizens: women were needed in the public realm of government to complete
the course of Christian civilization. The notion of civilization that operated
most forcefully at the Women’s Congress was the distinction between the
Christian and the non-Christian, inasmuch as Christianity was a discourse
associated with what most speakers saw as women’s superior status in the
West.
Gail Bederman, in Manliness and Civilization, sees the Woman’s
Building as a sign of women’s marginal position in civilization. However, as
Rydell suggests, the building’s placement is actually more complex, because
it works to remind Christian women of their pivotal role in constructing
civilization, a civilization—like the exposition grounds themselves—that
is directed toward the ends of a white masculine culture. The “dominant
12 Keeping Up Her Geography

version of civilization” in the late nineteenth century is usually understood

by contemporary historians to be equated with the influence of social
Darwinism (Bederman 25). As Bederman notes, advanced civilizations
“could [be identified] by the degree of their sexual differentiation . . . men
and women had evolved pronounced sexual differences” (25). However,
the discourse of civilization and women’s status is much older than social
Darwinism and was actually used against female abolitionists by ministers at
least as early as the 1830s. For example in the previously mentioned sermon
by Stearns, he forcefully argued against women’s political participation in
abolitionism, not on the basis that women should stay and see to their duties
in the home, but based on their mediating role in creating civilized men.
Stearns warned women that they may perform the social duties of helping the
poor, orphans, and the outcast, but to speak out publicly was to relinquish
the benefits of civilization. Stearns told his female congregants,

Yours it is to determine, whether the beautiful order of society . . . shall

continue as it has been, to be a source of blessings. . . . Yours it is to
decide, under God, whether we shall be a nation of refined and high
minded Christians, or whether, rejecting the civilities of life, and throw-
ing off the restraints of morality and piety, we shall become a fierce race
of semibarbarians, before whom neither order, nor honor, nor chastity
can stand. And be assured, ladies, if the hedges and borders of the social
garden be broken up, the lovely vine, which now twines itself so grace-
fully upon the trellis, and bears such rich lusters, will be the first to fall
and be trodden under foot. (50)

The feminist/antifeminist debate over the meaning of civilization was quite

old at the end of the nineteenth century, and was definitively connected to
debates about women’s participation in politics and their physical presence
in public—a presence that not only is supposed to represent the destruction
of civilization but implies that women will suffer the consequences through
physical assault. In these debates, the power of separate spheres as an ideol-
ogy is directly related to both the promise of physical protection and the
threat of physical assault.
By the time of the Exposition this threat seems to have lost some of
its power, but it was still relevant for women’s redefining of civilization and
imagining of citizenship; their vision of civilization would have to show why
this threat was no longer relevant, why female embodiment, represented as
physical weakness, no longer mattered in the structuring of civilization. The
version they produced in opposition to masculine definitions of civilization
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 13

was exclusionary, utopic, and contradictory, bearing the traces of conflict and
dissent that had already been evoked throughout the planning of women’s
participation in the exposition—black women’s representation on the Board
of Lady Managers, the place of suffragism, the question of integration and
separation in the exhibiting of women’s work, and the wisdom of construct-
ing the building itself. Moreover, a debate occurred between those who
placed women’s economic independence at the center of women’s interest
and those who placed suffrage at the center of their arguments for women’s
equality. This nascent debate—which never really became central for reasons
I discuss later—seems to me to be quite relevant for a discussion of the pub-
lic/private binary. For it details how the tension between middle-class wom-
en’s own understanding of women’s inequality is specifically related to their
focus on the production-reproduction axis and the private-political axis of
the binary. Furthermore, it illuminates how late nineteenth-century women
speakers understood the home as a social location and understood its inter-
relationship with the political realm of citizenship. The point here is partly to
rediscover what seems to have been lost in contemporary debates about sepa-
rate spheres—the majority of the women speakers understood quite well that
the two spheres were mutually constitutive and based their arguments for
citizenship and their definition of civilization on the grounds of this interre-
lationship. But it also shows the extent to which this insight leads in radically
different directions and results in conflicts that are not so different from cur-
rent debates in feminist and American studies.
According to Jeanne Madeline Weimann, in The Fair Women, Susan
B. Anthony “said that the Fair had done more for the cause of woman
suffrage than twenty-five years of agitation, giving it ‘unprecedented
prestige in the world of thought’” (595). This is a significant tribute to
women’s participation and role in the Exposition. This tribute is significant
because Anthony, along with other suffragists, helped petition for women’s
administrative participation in the event, but both suffragists and suffragism
were marginalized in women’s organizing of the fair. Suffragists wanted
membership on the national committee; instead a separate Ladies Auxiliary
Board of Managers was created, with Bertha Palmer, a wealthy Chicago
clubwoman, as its President. Palmer was not a suffragist but was committed
to women’s economic issues, to exhibiting women’s achievements, and
to proving women capable of performing the kind of organizational work
assigned to the Board on a national and international level. However, the
World’s Representative Congress of Women was organized not by Palmer, but
primarily by the suffragist May Wright Sewall, and it was within this venue
that the Exposition became specifically an argument for women’s suffrage.
14 Keeping Up Her Geography

Surprisingly, the Representative Congress seems to have been mostly ignored

when considering the Exposition’s significance—in spite of Anthony’s
enthusiasm. Most mentions of the fair focus on the building alone or focus
on the Women’s Congress held in the Woman’s Building which was a separate
and more traditional event. Both Alan Trachtenberg and Erik Trump’s
assessment of women’s visions seem to have been based on the speeches given
at the Woman’s Building.7 Thus, Trachtenberg, Trump and Bederman all
conclude that women’s participation in the Exposition was marginal and their
representation almost entirely domestic. But the two separate Congresses
seem to have decidedly different goals in terms of representation. While
the Representative Congress had speeches from representatives of national
women’s organizations and focused almost exclusively on the work of those
organizations and their commitment to suffrage, the Woman’s Congress
in the Woman’s Building treated a variety of different subjects and was, as
critics indicate, much more traditional in its approach to defining women’s
place in culture.8 Ignoring the Representative Congress means ignoring how
women used the Exposition to redefine civilization, overlooking a significant
moment in the suffrage movement, and neglecting black women’s most
visible—almost only—participation in the Exposition.9
Women’s desires to organize across race, class, and national bound-
aries are repeated again and again at the Representative Congress, but, as
Trachtenberg’s phrase “unity in subordination” suggests there was also a sig-
nificant tension between the ideals of Christian unity and the articulation of
women’s status within the nation representing a nation’s place on the evolu-
tionary scale of civilization. For example, while Lina Morgenstern of Ger-
many argued that the Congress represented the moment “when the women
of all lands unite to form an international bond of union” and her hope
that “this bond [could] help to overcome all prejudices of nations, races,
and faiths!” (Sewall 550), her vision of unity chiefly included Anglo-Euro-
pean middle-class women and a few representative women from the Middle
East and Latin America and middle-class representatives of black America.10
But this “unity through subordination” must also be seen as one that origi-
nates from the association of America with women’s freedom. According to
the women of the Exposition, contradicting both Darwinist and Christian
definitions of women’s role in civilization, America represented civilization
precisely because of the political, educational, and economic gains of Ameri-
can women. Their public presence, and not the industrial complexity of the
White City, indicated the extent to which America had achieved civilization.
Florence Fenwick Miller, a representative from England, put it this way,
“When I first began to talk on women’s questions they were generally spoken
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 15

of as ‘Americanisms.’ . . . Any new idea as to the education of women, or

the admittance of women to the learned professions, or any improvement
in women’s dress was an Americanism” (Sewall 20). Thus, before there was
feminism there was “Americanism” a testament to what was seen as Ameri-
can women’s status in U.S. culture. Since, as many women at the Congress
reminded the audience, the status of women was the leading indicator of a
nation’s progress toward civilization, then American women and the United
States were looked to as the forerunner of women’s rights.11 This nationalist
progressive history of women’s status in the United States is aligned with the
Exposition’s design to represent America itself as the apex of civilization:

It is as true as it was four hundred years ago that the condition of the
women of a nation is the measure of its culture and civilization. Whether
we look at our own land where women may vote, hold office, do busi-
ness, enter upon any profession as the social equal of man, enjoying
respectful consideration and chivalrous treatment; or whether we turn
our eyes to our sisters in Eastern lands, shut up in the harems and zena-
nas of the rich, or toiling like slaves in the hovels of the poor. (Greene
in Sewall 52)12

So it is not surprising that the message of the Congress of Representative

Women focused on the equation of civilization with women’s status. But
this discourse of women’s status always superseded the nation in the speak-
ers’ desire to redefine civilization from a particularly feminist perspective.
Part of their task was to divorce women’s rights, particularly the fight for
suffrage, from the discourse of Americanism and the discourse of difference
represented in dominant notions of civilization that represented women’s sta-
tus in the social realm as a privilege conferred on EuroAmerican women by
EuroAmerican men. This desire is made explicit in May Wright Sewall’s clos-
ing address to the Women’s Representative Congress, “this chapter [the Con-
gress] proves that the woman question is no longer an Americanism; that it
is no longer a local question at all; that it can not be regarded as the curious
culminating expression of the insane passion for independence characteristic
of the Anglo-Saxon race” (Sewall 632).
Examples of this discourse from the speeches given at the Representative
Congress are numerous. I have chosen to discuss only a few of those that most
clearly define what is at stake in thinking about civilization from the women
speakers’ perspective. Specifically, while the dominant meaning of civiliza-
tion may have rested on the notion of the distinction of the sexes, the women
speakers were more ambivalent about the future necessity of those distinctions.
16 Keeping Up Her Geography

Greene, mentioned above, continued her speech, by arguing that “the ideal
of the human as in Divine Law shall be attained when there can be neither
Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male or
female—for we are above all one in Christ Jesus” (52). This rejection of any
distinction between different races, classes, and genders was articulated from
within women’s use of separate spheres ideology to define civilization on their
own terms. In this respect, they found their unity in defining themselves against
“masculine civilization.” This contradictory desire to both make oppositional
claims based on sex and the desire to negate the terms of “sex distinction” is
not as contradictory or ironic as it seems; it merely articulates the complexity of
women’s relation to the public/private dichotomy as they try to enter the pub-
lic sphere, not as inferior creatures, and, thus, always lesser than men, but not
on masculine terms either.13 Late nineteenth-century speakers at the Exposition
were convinced that women’s full inclusion in public life—represented for them
by suffrage—would guarantee not only their own equality with men, but trans-
form the very terms that the gendered public/private ideology used to exclude
them—the meaning of what it meant to be an individual and a citizen.
First, women had to articulate their definition of civilization in opposition
to that represented by the masculine dichotomy of the Midway and the White
City. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued, “Our civilization to-day is simply mascu-
line. Everything is carried by force, and violence, and war, and will be until the
feminine element is fully recognized and has equal power in the regulation of
human affairs” (Sewall 485). And women made it clear that the time for mas-
culine notions of “protection” used to prevent them from entering public space
no longer represented the future of civilization, only its past, “Since questions
of peace, of arbitration, and of reconciliation have superseded those of war and
conquest, physical force is at a discount. Reason and justice applied to human
affairs mark the spirit of the nineteenth century” (McDonnell in Sewall 684).
One of six black women speakers at the Congress, Frances Watkins Harper was
particularly virulent in her condemnation of masculine civilization,

Not the opportunity of discovering new worlds, but that of filling this
old world with fairer and higher aims than the greed of gold and the lust
of power, is hers. Through the weary wasting years men have destroyed,
dashed in pieces, and overthrown, but to-day we stand on the threshold
of women’s era, and women’s work is grandly constructive. (Sewall 434)

And, finally, many women speakers rejected masculine civilization as

imperialism. For example, Julia Ward Howe argued that, “The soldier is no
longer the supreme example of heroism, but simply a necessary evil. The
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 17

thoughtful, the life-preserving virtues are in ascendant to-day” (Sewall 316).

This definition of civilization emerges from the language of separate spheres,
but this also allows a redefinition of the relation between public and private and
the individual. The progress of civilization no longer hinges on the distinction
between the sexes in terms of separate spheres, but on the idea that masculine
civilization has outlived its usefulness, an impediment to civilization rather
than a contributor to it.
Women, in fact, have been the primary contributors to “civilization”
according to Harper (the exhibits of the Woman’s Building were often used
to support these claims). And, according to most women speakers, this con-
tribution emerges from her recognition of the interrelationship of the pub-
lic/private; the women speakers’ interest in the home is not an interest in the
“domestic” as it contributes to a configuration of the national as represented
in the Exposition, but as that social location that has helped them understand
the interrelation between public and private freedoms.14 The discourse of the
home as social location figures not as a support of Darwinism but as a recon-
figuration of the principles of citizenship. Most women, such as the Countess
of Aberdeen, were willing to forego a discussion of men and women’s spheres
to rearticulate the inseparability of women’s social work with the political:

We believe in the essential oneness of the interests of women and men,

and we appeal to the sense of justice of the latter to allow us our fair share
in shaping destinies of our common country. Men and women have sepa-
rate spheres no doubt, but it is not for one sex to arrogate to itself the sole
right to define the limits of those spheres. . . . There is no such thing as
‘moral and social equality’ apart from political equality. An unrepresented
class is always a neglected, abused, and degraded class. (Sewall 418–19)

Similarly, Ellen Foster argued that women’s interrelated interests in the home
and in the social realm could not be attained without the ballot:

It is impossible for women to carry movements of social economics in

their hearts and in their activities up to the point of these relations of
these questions to the government and then suddenly let go their hold
and see these various objects of their solicitude lost in the whirlpool of
politics, where being disenfranchised, women have no recognized place.
(Sewall 440)

In the words of Florence Adams, “A republic is but a political order of a matri-

archal home, as an empire is a patriarchal ideal” (Sewall 345). This notion
18 Keeping Up Her Geography

that the social order that women brought to a home could be extended, was
in fact, a metaphor for a republican form of government, was only one way
the home became a site of social location. Other speakers noted that a home
could not be sustained without the political influence of women—that the
domestic and the political were so intertwined that any work women accom-
plished in the social sphere was wasted if women did not have political rights.
This concept of political rights, founded as it was on a notion of the social,
necessarily led to a revision of what it meant to be an individual.
According to Sarah Early, the individual was first and foremost a “social
being” (Sewall 718). And, Howe argued that “We often hear of the phe-
nomenon of double consciousness, . . . but a double conscience is of far
greater importance”(Sewall 711). And Sarah Hackett Stevenson concurred,
arguing, “this divorce between the individual and the social conscience is the
most dangerous evil of modern times” (Sewall 711). So, the speakers under-
stood the right to vote not merely as an individual right, but as an opportu-
nity to transform what was meant by the individual. Their intent is clearly
to use the ballot to transform women’s place in the public/private binary, but
they also believed that transforming women’s place meant eradicating any
significant difference between the individual, the social, and the political.
However, their discussion of the home as a social location not only demon-
strates their understanding of the relation of home and state, but points to
the problems raised by this insight.
The majority of the speakers believed that the women’s organizations
they represented could use the ballot to achieve social ends. Fewer women
speakers were concerned with women’s political rights and economic equality
as end in itself; the ballot was the political means women needed to carry out
their social transformation. Sarah Stevenson may have been in favor of using
the ballot as a “social conscience,” but she also warned women against seeing
women’s social organizations as a substitute for women’s individual liberties.
She argued that “this tendency to organize is not conducive to the highest
individual development.” So, although the United States has many “great
organizations of women, we have few, if any, great women” (Sewall 708).
Stevenson claimed that women would never be able to develop the ability
for self-governance and the rights of the individual, as long as they placed
organization above self-development. And, in fact, according to Stevenson,
women’s organizing abilities to effect social change—their attempt to use the
ballot as a means to social ends—was merely allowing “masculine culture” to
more narrowly define its own social responsibilities, both in the home and
political realm. Stevenson warned that men and women were likely to grow
further apart in their definitions of civilization, and, thus, in their perception
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 19

of the relation between the public and private. Women, may indeed, inherit
the public as the social, allowing masculine culture to neglect individual
responsibility for the social domain, and retaining a sense of the private as
elite men’s individual right to freedom from the claims of the social/public.
In other words, women’s assumption of greater responsibility through orga-
nization, merely allocates men more freedom within the public sphere.
Women entering the public sphere of politics as mediators of the rela-
tion between the social and the political become a problem for those speakers
concerned with women entering the public domain as independent individu-
als. As Anthony noted, “It is because women have been taught always to work
for something else than their own personal freedom; and the hardest thing in
the world is to organize women for the one purpose of securing their political
liberty and political equality” (Sewall 464). In fact, Anthony’s speech sought
to remind women that their responsibilities in the home were precisely what
prevented them from working toward their own political rights:

If man is a little world, woman is expected to be a little universe—‘all

things by turns and nothing long.’ A woman must be versatile, and
ready to fill any niche at a moment’s notice. She must sew on a button
or write a poem, must roast herself in the kitchen or receive guests in
the drawing room, with equal grace and facility; and what with keeping
up her geography and her accomplishments she will beg to be excused
from what she thinks the dry and uninteresting subjects of business,
current events, and politics. (Sewall 328)

Incorporating the home as a social location into the political realm was one
thing, but if men and women’s relation to the home, and thus, the social,
remained the same, then women would continue to be seen as subordi-
nate. Stevenson and Anthony give new meaning to Trachtenberg’s argument
that the Exposition represents “unity through subordination.” Women had
already entered the public sphere as representatives of those aspects of the
social sphere which were social precisely because traditional notions of the
public/private divide continued to reproduce elite men who saw the social
sphere as a degraded realm—the site of “problems” for those who would
maintain their dominance in those realms defined in masculine culture as
private: the marketplace and the home. According to their definition of the
individual, the social realm of women need not exist.
Men’s exclusion of the social from both the private realm of the mar-
ketplace and home, and the public realm of politics can be clearly seen at the
Exposition itself. Whereas women were working to divorce women’s rights
20 Keeping Up Her Geography

from Americanism and attempting to redefine the individual as a social

being, at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting, held in con-
junction with the Exposition, Frederick Jackson Turner was defining Ameri-
canism and the individual in precisely opposite terms. Turner’s speech, “The
Significance of the Frontier in American History,” as Trachtenberg argues,
represented a celebration of “heroic masculine traits.” Among these traits was
the notion of a “dominant individualism” that rejected both the political and
the social as a restraint to the character of the American:

The Westerner defended himself and resented governmental restric-

tions. . . . The idea of the personality of law was often dominant over
the organized machinery of justice. That method was best which was
most direct and effective. . . . In a word, the unchecked development
of the individual was the significant product of this frontier democracy.
(Turner 37)

Therefore, Turner’s construction of the American character, the contents of

his American individual, is fundamentally at odds with those definitions
offered by the women speakers of the Congress. Turner’s individual is only
reluctantly social and only to the extent to which he needs the state to “pro-
tect” an already constituted individuality: “As has been indicated the frontier
is productive of individualism. . . . The tendency is anti-social. It produces
antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control” (Turner 22).
Nor can it be argued that Turner was merely discussing the character of the
American past. His portrait of national character suggested that such traits
were what made an individual an American.15 Specific to the venue of the
Exposition, we can see that the dominance of the Halls of Technology and
Machinery when compared to the small size of the Woman’s Building and
its marginalization at the boundaries of the White City convey the tension
between the women speakers’ vision of the political future of citizenship and
the dominant masculine version. Women were not marginal but central to
this dominant version of civilization. Nevertheless, their attempt to use their
mediating position to revise the ways in which the Exposition constructed
civilization was only partially successful.
Most women speakers felt that suffrage would signify an end to this
dilemma by raising men to their level. However, their notion that women’s
social role could be transformed into an argument for women’s suffrage is
dependent on an economic privilege that, although it allowed them to rein-
terpret civilization for a feminist discourse, was also supported by the public/
private distinction they hoped to undermine. The home that they envisioned
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 21

as a social location was produced by an economic system that men imagined

as being private; thus, the speakers’ version of the home as a social location
was fraught with contradictions, because it assumed that some version of this
home was what made individuals, as Sarah Early put it “social beings,” and
therefore, civilized.
The focus on domesticity at the Congress reveals women’s revisionist
understanding of citizenship in its emphasis on the social ethics of citizen-
ship—an ethics with broad appeal to middle-class Christian women, who
may have needed—as Susan B. Anthony indicates—to imagine their citizen-
ship rights as catering to more than their individual rights—and that ethics
was broad enough to encompass obligations that may have been in conflict
with one another. This, of course, is part of the problem of the utopic visions
represented by the women speakers’ desire to overturn masculine civilization.
Hierarchies of race, class, and culture always contradicted their desire for
unity. To speak about an international women’s movement that would—or
could—cure the ills of humanity, partly through the recognition of a com-
mon humanity was much easier said than practiced. The failure—and what
has sometimes been called the hypocrisy—of such a project has been well-
documented from every direction, and, in fact, can be documented in the
racist and classist arguments for the vote used by late nineteenth-century suf-
fragists. However, this does not necessarily mean that we should ignore the
women speakers’ attempt to reconfigure women’s relation to ideologies of
the public/private, nor should we see them as hopelessly essentialist in their
attempt to theorize what it means to be a citizen or an individual in opposi-
tion to that dominant culture of which they were so much a part.
For one, it may only be separate spheres ideology and white women’s
role as mediators of civilization—although middle-class black women who
spoke at the Congress imagined their citizenship in similar ways—that
allowed the conflicts between women to emerge, and allows us to see how
women’s attempt to organize within the midst of a male dominated politi-
cal structure can be particularly damaging if the goals of nationalism super-
sede the goals of women’s representation of themselves. This is particularly
apparent in the exclusion of black women from the Board of Lady Managers.
There is much evidence to conclude that black women were excluded from
the Board of Lady Managers, not only because of southern women’s objec-
tions to working with black women, but because the Board, like the Exposi-
tion itself, was attempting to fulfill a mandate represented by the National
Committee’s decision to locate the Exposition in Chicago and not New
York. Chicago, as a city of the West, was much less closely associated with
the bitter sectionalism of the Civil War. Post-Civil War Southern states were
22 Keeping Up Her Geography

still economically devastated by the Civil War and barely participated in the
Exposition—except for southern women. The exclusion of black women was
not merely a matter of placating southern women, but of putting the agenda
of national reconciliation before questions of inclusion and representative-
ness.16 This is all the more apparent when we consider that Palmer herself
may have been chosen because she was originally from Kentucky and that
she placed a fellow white Kentuckian in charge of black women’s interests at
the fair.
The problems of race and nation may in fact account for the two sepa-
rate Congresses—or at least the difference in their participants. The Con-
gress of Representative Women was organized by Sewall, a suffragist whose
sympathies were not with the Board of Lady Managers; the Woman’s Con-
gress held in the Woman’s Building, however, was organized by the Board.
southern white women participated in the Woman’s Congress; black women
did not. And, for the most part, white southern women did not speak at the
Representative Congress. Therefore, when the speakers at the Representative
Congress rose to speak, they were already well aware of the ways in which the
devotion to national unity as a form of citizenship could undermine women’s
rights.

II. RETHINKING THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE BINARY

Women’s inclusion of the home with the social indicates that we should not
think in terms of the home as private for women. The home and the market-
place may be considered private only in the imaginings of elite men such as
Turner. In fact, women’s position in the social indicates that women are actu-
ally excluded from the private—the economic and individual autonomy of
that person who, as a reflection of the public sphere’s interests, has no need to
act as a “social being.” The Woman’s Building, I think, is a more accurate sym-
bol of women’s entrapment in, and appropriation of, the social and their posi-
tion as bearers and representatives of social reproduction than the conflation of
woman/private/home. In effect, what the placement of the Woman’s Building
and the speakers at the Columbian Exposition make clear is that middle-class
women exist neither in the private nor the public, but as mediators between
those two realms. This is not an emancipatory position, however; nor should
we see it as one of women’s own making. Rather it emerges from the ambigui-
ties of the public/private divide in which the private refers to the space of the
home, only in so much as that home reproduces the private individual free to
pursue his own economic interests, and in so much as it produces the citizen
who is capable of representing the interests of the state.
Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 23

As I argue in chapter two, part of middle-class women’s interest in the

working-girl in the early twentieth century arises from just such a recogni-
tion. Whereas the Congress of Representative Women focused on suffrage
as the means to a social end, middle-class women’s interest in economic
independence was not well represented at the Exposition. Nor were work-
ing-class women given a forum to discuss the ends to which suffrage might
be used. The Board of Lady Managers attempted to contact working-class
women, but repeatedly reported failure in trying to talk to, gain data from,
and generally include urban working-class women in the Exposition.17 Even
Jane Addams, who might have spoken about working-class women and suf-
frage, preferred to focus on explaining all the reasons that working women
were abandoning domestic service for the factory. In chapter two, I argue
that urbanization and industrialization were factors that destroyed women’s
development of the home as a place of social reproduction that marginalized
both home and the middle-class woman who was struggling to make the
home as a social location a foundation for citizenship. The working-girl’s
representation as a symptom of urbanization becomes central to middle-class
women’s attempt to reconfigure the relation between women and the pub-
lic/private binary along the home/work axis of the divide and to reimagine
their own social place within that axis. Furthermore, I argue that the reform
narratives I discuss show how the home/work axis suppresses the social, as
manifested in these narratives’ portrayal of the working-girl’s attempt to cre-
ate a social space free of the masculine dominance that structures the home,
the workplace, and the street.
In chapter three, I develop this analysis of the public/private divide by
examining the southern agrarians’ challenge to the public/private binary as
it is constructed within the dominant national mode and in the context of
urbanization. I demonstrate that the southern agrarians reject any notion
of a conventional public sphere in their defining of regional culture. Basing
economics, politics, and the social on inherited property, they attempt to
maintain strict race, class, and gender exclusion by delegitimizing the pub-
lic sphere as an aberration of industrialized culture. This agrarian-regionalist
appropriation of social reproduction through the land effects a marginaliza-
tion of both female labor and the female reproductive body. Therefore, I
analyze how Ellen Glasgow’s novels, Barren Ground and Vein of Iron, func-
tion as a critique of this marginalization, indicating the extent to which the
agrarians’ refusal to recognize the need for a public, political sphere works to
subordinate women’s claims to economic, sexual, and reproductive justice to
those of masculine inheritance. I show how Glasgow’s attempt to redraw the
public/private binary from a feminist perspective is instructive, because it
24 Keeping Up Her Geography

reiterates the necessity of reconstructing a feminist vision of the public/pri-

vate divide that is not structured by masculine perspectives and properties.
In the final chapter, I return to the discussion of feminist citizenship
raised here to explain how two feminist writers appropriate the Turnerian
model of citizenship to transform themselves into representative subjects;
Zora Neale Hurston and Agnes Smedley appropriate that very construct
of the individual that the women speakers of the Columbian Exposition
rejected, the model of the heroic frontier citizen. I argue that their appropria-
tion of this model is both disabling and instructive. First, their appropriation
of the Turnerian model allows for race and class based feminist critiques of
the women speakers’ vision of citizenship. Second, it allows us to see how
inadequate the Turnerian model is for theorizing a feminist citizenship,
because it constructs the female body as a violation of the public/private
divide. Finally, their use of the frontier model allows us to see how necessary
a feminist revision of the public/private divide still is, if feminists want to
continue to transform the meaning of citizenship so that it is responsive to
female embodiment and feminist complaint.
Chapter Two
Journeys into Urban Interiors

At the turn-of-the-century, no figure appeared more often or in a greater

variety of contexts than the urban working-girl. The subject of numerous fact
gathering surveys and reform movements, a prototype for female heroines of
mass-marketed romances, high-brow urban novels, and popular tenement
tales, she is an object of censure and sympathy, of reform and fascination.1
The most obviously “new” product of urbanization, industrialization, and
immigration, she cuts across disparate spaces, a hyphenated figure defined by
her shifting positions in the home, in the workplace, and in the commercial
and social places of the urban environment. Not only does the working-girl
work, she performs double duty as a symptom through which the chang-
ing spatial relations of public and private and their gendered implications
are constructed. She functions as an axis of displacement and condensation
that holds together heterogeneous spaces and through which the gendered
implications of urbanization are articulated and refigured in cultural texts of
the era.
The working-girl’s status as a figure representing the problems of
urbanization is most evident in social reform texts of the era whose authors
desire to ameliorate the environmental conditions in which the working
woman lives and works by representing her “world” to a middle-class read-
ership. This desire to depict working-class life to a middle-class audience is
representative of the era. For instance, Jean-Christophe Agnew argues that
the title of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) reflects the “new,
yet increasingly common assumption among [the book’s] readers that, for
the first time in American history, classes had somehow become inacces-
sible to one another” (Agnew 137). Therefore, the relation between the
middle class and the working class is figured as a problem of making one
class accessible to the other. In representations of the working-girl, this
problem of “accessibility” is figured as one of geographic distance, so that

25
26 Keeping Up Her Geography

the difference between middle-class author and the working-girl necessi-

tates a traveling into the world of the other. This distance, I argue, operates
as a trope of female downward mobility, articulating the urban environ-
ment itself as a dislocation of the female subject’s place in the social and
economic structure.
In this chapter, I interrogate how middle-class, white female reform-
ers attempt to promote gendered reform through an examination of the
urban working-girl’s home and work conditions. As a continuation of
my analysis of the home as social location in chapter one, my argument,
here, shows how early twentieth-century women writers represented the
urban and domestic as mutually constitutive of one another and accessed
that intersection through the figure of the working-girl. I argue that these
authors imagine the working-girl in two related ways: as a manifestation
of the process of urbanization and as a fallen middle-class female subject.
The working-girl, in these reform narratives, articulates the authors’ cul-
tural anxieties about the meaning and place of traditional middle-class
female subjectivity in an urbanized culture that marginalizes the home as a
social location. Since the middle-class female subject traditionally has rep-
resented, and been represented by domestic space, these authors write the
home’s marginalization as a displacement of female subjectivity. In inter-
preting the working-girl as a fallen middle-class female subject—and not as
a working-class female subject—each of the authors I examine attempts to
redefine women’s social position in U.S. culture through a rewriting of the
working-girl’s relation to both domestic and urban spaces. Each attempts
to create a new female subject, a female subject capable of reemerging from
the trajectory of downward mobility that the working-girl’s subordinate
position in the urban environment represents.
I examine in depth three of the most popular social reform texts of
the era: Bessie Van Vorst’s undercover investigation of the working-girl (writ-
ten with her sister-in-law Marie Van Vorst), The Woman Who Toils: Being the
Experience of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (1903); journalist Dorothy Richard-
son’s The Long Day: the Story of a New York Working Girl (1905), a novel pre-
sented as an autobiography of the author’s rise from working-girl to writer;
and popular travel and fiction writer Clara E. Laughlin’s The Work-a-Day Girl
(1911), a collection of journalistic essays in “story-form.”2 Writing from the
imagined space of the working-girl, the authors attempt to articulate “what
the working-girl wants,” but also to redefine middle-class female subjectivity
in an urban culture that is consistently imagined as marginalizing the domes-
tic space that had traditionally represented middle-class women’s position in
U.S. culture.
Journeys into Urban Interiors 27

The distance between the working-girl and middle-class woman is

imagined as the distance between this domestic space and the urban envi-
ronment. In particular, the traditional middle-class home is written as sepa-
rate from the city, existing in the countryside and the suburbs, separate from
the urban environment, but also, as the originary point of reference for the
female subject’s emergence into the urban environment; in these writings,
the home defines the female subject, and it is the female subject’s entrance
into, her falling into, the urban that transforms her into the working-girl. In
turn, the urban environment transforms the middle-class space of domestic-
ity into a vacancy within which the middle-class woman is isolated from the
urban environment that increasingly defines U.S. culture.3
In examining social reform texts, I reorient traditional U.S. urban
studies, particularly literary studies, toward a reconsideration of previously
marginalized contexts for understanding the gendered implications of urban-
ization. The American city has conventionally been read in terms of male
canonical authors’ concern with public space and its spectacles. Alienation,
mobility, rootlessness, and isolation are emphasized as the central compo-
nents of urban space; as Sydney Bremer indicates in Urban Intersections,
this view emphasizes the visual and industrial transformations of the public
landscape: the skyscraper, the street, the crowd, the train. Even those critics
who address the female subject’s place within the urban environment tend to
exclude reform narratives from study. Literary critics often do not see urban
social reform narratives as representative of urban culture; thus, they tend
not to examine how these narratives represent and respond to urban culture’s
effect upon the domestic sphere, and middle-class women’s understanding
of how that transformation affects their own cultural identity. Critics also
overlook the role that gender plays in many urban reform movements—and
the centrality of reform narratives to women’s writing of culture. Similarly,
historical and literary readings of the working-girl do not examine the work-
ing-girl as a symptomatic figure whose appearance in myriad texts of the
era represents middle-class anxiety about the female subject’s place within
an urban culture that increasingly marginalizes the cultural influence of
female domestic space, and, thus, the female subject.4 In contrast, I argue
that women’s narratives of social reform are important cultural contexts for
reexamining both how middle-class women write the gendered implications
of urbanization, and how urbanization is figured in their narratives as a par-
ticularly gendered problem, one that could be accessed through its represen-
tative subject, the working-girl.
While I focus on how the working-girl functions as a trope of down-
ward mobility for these authors, I also argue that the distance between home
28 Keeping Up Her Geography

and city is interpreted differently in each text, affecting the writer’s ability
to overcome—through reform—the female subject’s subordinate position in
U.S. culture. This is most obvious in Bessie Van Vorst’s text; because Van
Vorst writes urbanization as a threat to home and to the “American” wom-
an’s ability to articulate her difference from the immigrant working-girl, she
imagines a retreat to the home and a reclamation of the reproductive, aes-
thetic, and moral influence located there as the only alternative to the mas-
culinization and moral deterioration of the American female. In contrast,
Dorothy Richardson incorporates the working-girl as a cultural type into her
reform narrative in order to rewrite the domestic plot as the only possible
plot for female readers. However, in so doing, she retains the middle-class
home in the suburbs as an ideal capable of providing the female subject with
a security and success denied her by the economic and social inequalities
of the city. Finally, Clara Laughlin examines, through an explicit reversal of
the plot of downward mobility, how the working-girl’s position in the urban
environment is directly related to the female subject’s subordinate position
within the home.
In the last section of this chapter, I turn to the home’s interior to dem-
onstrate how the politics of domestic and urban space manifest themselves
within women authors’ repeated invocation of the significance of the parlor
as a gendered space. In this section, I reject traditional readings of the living
room as a space that manifests gendered equality, and traditional readings
of the parlor that focus on it only as a middle-class space. I argue that its
significance as a site of desire cuts across differences of class and ethnicity,
revealing women’s attempts to carve out of the male-dominated home and
the inequalities of the city a female social space.

I. WHEREIN VORST, RICHARDSON, AND LAUGHLIN JOURNEY

INTO ‘OTHER’ WORLDS TO ‘HELP’ THE WORKINGGIRL AND
EDIFY THE MIDDLECLASS

“I am going over now into the world of the unfortunate . . .”

This declaration from Bessie Van Vorst’s The Woman Who Toils (1903) is sim-
ple and clear in its delineation of the separation of the author from those she
sets out to investigate: her investigation requires that she leave her own world
and enter a world to which few of her middle-class readers choose to jour-
ney. In order to do this, she must divest herself of the “Parisian clothes” that
“present the familiar outline of any woman of the world” (11). Van Vorst,
Journeys into Urban Interiors 29

however, “determine[s] to make the sacrifice,” and “set[s] out to surmount

physical fatigue and revulsion, to place [her] intellect and sympathy in con-
tact as a medium between the working girl who wants help and the more
fortunately situated who want to help her” (6). She desires to act as a “mouth-
piece” for the woman laborer and “put into words her cry for help” (7). Van
Vorst’s desire to act as “medium” between the two worlds carries the spiritual
thread of the narrative throughout the text. By the end of the narrative, it
becomes clear that this is more than a mere passing metaphor of spiritual-
ism. Van Vorst comes to imagine the working-girl as an uninhabited subject,
a vacant body whose very vacancy marks the difference between author and
subject. It is this difference that Van Vorst seeks to remedy, not only for the
working-girl, but inasmuch as she sees this vacancy within the working-girl
as threatening to the cultural position of the middle-class woman.
From the beginning of Van Vorst’s undertaking, she makes it clear to
the reader that she is entering a world different from her own, but, also, that
the working-girl world represents the tendencies of America’s “new society”;
the working-girl world, she implies, represents a future that encompasses her
own world, and so presumably all American women. Thus, Van Vorst wants
to “discern the tendencies of a new society as manifested by its working girls”
(7). This is the troubling paradox that marks the author’s text: if the work-
ing-girl’s world is separate from her own, it is also imagined as representing
the future of America. It also accounts for the unexamined class slippages
of the text: the working-girl is both “other” and a figure for the future of
“the” American woman. If Van Vorst desires to help the working-girl, she
also desires to intervene in a historical narrative that she consistently imag-
ines as a downwardly mobile spiral that threatens the spiritual, aesthetic, and
reproductive potential of the American woman.
Van Vorst’s narrative, as it moves from place to place, is a spatial plotting
of the progressive deevolutionary future of feminine America. Her movement
from place to place is revealed as a spatialized plotting of the female subject’s
spiritual, aesthetic, and reproductive decline. Moreover, her analysis moves
progressively from representing the urban working-girl as held in “bondage”
to the material demands of industrial organization to representing the work-
ing-girl as the one who drives the urban machine of industrialization. This
mobility threatens the physical and social regeneration of the American land-
scape. So, by the end of her narrative, it becomes clear that Van Vorst’s desire
is not only, or primarily, to help the working-girl, but to intervene in the
urban environment’s spatial organization of gender, to interrupt and disrupt
its mobilization of female subjects away from the home, which she sees as a
vacating of female subjectivity itself.
30 Keeping Up Her Geography

Van Vorst divides her section of The Woman Who Toils into three chap-
ters, according to her investigation of the working-girl in different geographic
locations. This matter-of-fact organization of the text unfolds, however, as
a spiritual topography of America that is both classed and gendered. This
spiritual topography mediates between various spatial tropes that function
throughout the narrative as building blocks in Van Vorst’s reform-oriented
reconstruction of woman’s place in an increasingly urbanized nation. The
interior and the exterior body, the Old World and the New, the city and the
countryside, the home and the factory, all are incorporated into Van Vorst’s
text. Moreover, this spatial organization is intersected by the temporal order-
ing of the text, a seasonal progression that promises readers a spiritual story
of death and renewal that is instead disrupted by the American female sub-
ject’s drive toward an unnatural destiny.
Arriving in Pittsburgh, her first destination, in the middle of winter,
Van Vorst describes the city in the language of death, a common represen-
tation of the season, but this death-like environment has unnatural causes.
Industrialization defines the environment, overwhelming home and social
life, and disrupting the aesthetic pleasures of winter. The factories’ black
walls darken the streets with shadows that block the white light of winter and
their constant output of smoke covers the snow with soot “like a mantle of
perpetual mourning” (12). This soot, moreover, is a funereal ash representing
the end result of the industrial process that passes bodies through to be con-
sumed and vanish into “waving arms of smoke and steam . . . sparks that
shine an instant against the dark sky and are spent forever” (21). The vision
of bodies evaporating into the air becomes a ritual in which workers’ bodies
are offered up as a sacrifice for the benefit of the “feudal lords” and “wor-
shipers of gain” whose material demands must be met. The author images
the Americanization process of the primarily immigrant working population
in the language of sacrifice and regeneration: “The stagnant scum of other
countries floats hither to be purified in the fierce bouillon of live opportu-
nity” (12). The “altar” of the industrial machine replaces the “hearth” of the
“united domestic group” and absorbs its members into the urban environ-
ment, leaving the home vacant.
Woman’s body, according to Van Vorst, is most threatened by this indus-
trialized environment, since her family and social life have been absorbed
into the factory, dissipating the home that provides her natural, legal, and
social protection. If the factory is a shrine to “worshipers of gain,” it is the
working-girl who serves as the chief sacrifice. Van Vorst describes her soul
as trapped in a grotesque body that has adapted not only to the brutality of
machine labor, but to the material deprivation she experiences in the home:
Journeys into Urban Interiors 31

“As our souls develop with the advantages of all that constitutes an ideal—an
intellectual, esthetic and moral ideal—their souls diminish under the oppres-
sion of a constant physical effort to meet material demands” (20). The work-
ing-girl, then, appears different from Van Vorst’s middle-class readers; just
as middle-class readers are free to place the “ideal” above the “material,” so
must the working-girl sacrifice this “ideal” in order to meet the demands of
life. At this juncture in the text, Van Vorst sees this sacrifice as a result of the
brutal industrial conditions under which the working-girl labors. And it is
this sacrifice that constitutes Van Vorst’s chief emotional appeal on behalf of
the woman laborer.
In Van Vorst’s view the working-girl’s body is a prison that holds cap-
tive a being with the relative capacity for morals and emotions equal to that
of her middle-class reader; the body—its physical demands and disfigure-
ments—holds her soul captive. Industrial organization destroys the body,
“but the harm done them is not the physical suffering their condition causes,
but the moral and spiritual bondage in which it holds them” (19). However,
her representation of the process of industrialized labor as a ritual sacrifice
of the body, as a process of purification, also tropes the physical suffering
of the working-girl as a necessary condition of moral and spiritual survival.
Particularly suggestive of Van Vorst’s representation of factory labor’s brutal-
ity as a necessary sacrifice is her concluding image of the relation between the
“worshipers of gain” and the working-girl:

. . . but their souls suffer nothing from working in squalor and sor-
didness. Certain acts of impulsive generosity, of disinterested kind-
ness, of tender sacrifice, of loyalty and fortitude shone out in the
poverty-stricken wretches I met on my way, as the sun shines glori-
ous in iridescence on the rubbish heap that goes to fertilize some rich
man’s fields. (160)

In this passage, Van Vorst means to undermine accusations that the physical
brutality and sordidness of the environment in which the working-girl lives
reflects her emotional and spiritual capacity: she wants to provide evidence
of a working-class interiority that is inaccessible to her middle-class reader-
ship because of their position in the “other” world. However, the metaphor
operates, in effect, to suggest the usefulness of that interiority primarily as a
regenerative force for the very industrial powers that consign the working-
girl to deprivation. Van Vorst naturalizes the working-girl’s body as sacrifi-
cial “waste” by comparing it explicitly to fertilizer, a disintegrating base that
enriches the products of others. The process of vaporization through which
32 Keeping Up Her Geography

the female body passes in machine labor is no different than the life cycle
that turns the “waste” of physical consumption, or the “stagnant scum” of
the Old World, into a foundation for the New American subject.
When Van Vorst moves from Pittsburgh to Perry, an upstate New York
milltown, she presents the town as a space of regenerative possibility, a place
perhaps where the female body might be regenerated. Through generations
of “common effort” the “bouillon” of “live opportunity” becomes the fertil-
izer that produces the “strong American cement” from which the native born
working-girls of Perry derive their character; it is the manifestation of the puri-
fication process that occurs in the World Bazaar of Pittsburgh. Instead of being
physically defeated by their work at the mill, the town’s young population is full
of “gaiety”; “a possible touch of romance” hangs constantly in the air among
this well-dressed and ambitious group. Whereas, generations separate New
York society girls from the immigrant female workers of Pittsburgh, only “a
few years of culture and training” separate these “wild rose[s]” from the “Amer-
ican beauty” [a cultivated hybrid rose] (69). Generations of “Americanization”
have turned these native born females into women who closely resemble those
of Van Vorst’s own class. Moreover, their semi-rural habitat causes Van Vorst
to extend her metaphor of fertilization; employing the metaphor of cultivation
to link the women with her own class, she suggests that the Pittsburgh female
immigrant’s sacrifice produces both these young native born working-class
women and the more cultivated women of Van Vorst’s class.
The workers so closely resemble the women of the author’s own class that
Van Vorst can appear at Perry in a costume that has some semblance to her own
clothing, delighted to be recognized as both a “mill-hand” and a “lady” by a
countryman. This delight, however, quickly dissipates when Van Vorst realizes
that it is the industrial possibilities of the landscape, and not its romantic ones,
that attract the ladies to Perry. The same characteristics that bring “boys and
girls” together in Perry threaten the regenerative forces that Van Vorst seeks:

There as everywhere in America, for an individual as for a place, the attrac-

tion was industrial possibilities. As Niagara has become more an industrial
than a picturesque landscape, so Perry, in spite of the serene and beautiful
surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical force in whose temple, the tall-
chimneyed mill, a human sacrifice is made to the worshipers of gain. (74)

Niagara, the sublime destination of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cul-

ture has been marred by industry; its romantic possibilities have been har-
nessed to the power of the machine. The comparison between Niagara and
Perry is not casual; this invocation of the honeymoon destination become
Journeys into Urban Interiors 33

industrialized images Van Vorst’s own perspective on Perry, where marriage

and reproduction are subordinated to the work of industrialization and the
adventure of independence.
Relinquishing her reproductive responsibilities for the independence
and luxuries that the machine offers, the native-born woman has become an
autocrat and a rival to the male. She ignores law, nature, and convention to
fulfill her own desires and thus carries within her a moral sterility that threat-
ens to manifest itself both in her body and within the American social body
as a physical sterility. Concerned only with “dress and men,” the women
never discuss “domestic cares. The management of an interior, housekeep-
ing, cooking, were things . . . never once . . . mentioned” (73). Seeking
woman’s home and social life, Van Vorst discovers church socials, dances,
plays, and picnics, but, to her dismay, not one baby residing in the town.
Not only does the Perry girl ignore the interior management of the home,
she pays no heed to the management of her interior self, her reproductive
and spiritual capacities.
The urban environment that defines the immigrant working culture of
Pittsburgh threatens to mold the native-born girl of Perry in its own indus-
trialized—and masculine—image. According to Van Vorst, American society,
where the individual is of more importance than family and state, where the
competition and strife of industrialism dominates, puts woman at a disadvan-
tage, since “nature disarms her for th[is] struggle” (80). Nature, in this sense,
is both woman’s inferior physical strength and her reproductive capabili-
ties. Nature, law, and social convention provide for woman’s protection, but
industrial organization drives woman toward a “destiny that is not normal”:
spinsterhood (80). The “attractions of machine labor” are meant only for
the woman who must act as breadwinner—not for the “materially indepen-
dent” woman who is “protected” by the sacrifices of the female breadwinner
and the protection of the male breadwinner from the masculinizing machine
labor of industrial America. The working-girl’s adventurous mobility, how-
ever, is only material, precipitating a “downward” spiral into moral, physi-
cal and aesthetic sterility that can only be reversed through the returning of
woman to the home. In order to accomplish this, Van Vorst attempts to reor-
ganize woman’s relation to the urban environment through further differen-
tiation of woman as a classed subject. She divides wage-earning women into
three distinct groups: the breadwinner, the semi-bread-winner, and the girl
who works for luxuries. Van Vorst imagines that the native-born girl of Perry
works only for luxuries, independence, and adventure. Whereas Van Vorst
images the immigrant working woman as a necessary sacrifice to the spiri-
tual enrichment of others, she imagines that the native-born girl heedlessly
34 Keeping Up Her Geography

sacrifices herself to an immigrant working culture for her own enrichment.

The native-born girl who works for luxuries is the “industrial unit” compli-
cating the urban landscape, the criminal of Van Vorst’s investigation.5 The
native-born woman of Perry has gone astray she argues, precisely because she
has become too American: ego-driven, independent, adventurous. A product
of generations of immigrant mixing, along with the regenerative spirit that
makes her “American,” she has absorbed the masculine character of industri-
alism.
If the native-born female subject absorbs the industrial character of
America to her detriment, then the machine around which the American
character is organized responds only to the superior force of the male who
is perfected, completed by the machine. Van Vorst depicts men as united
in common effort—across distinctions in class—in the role of breadwin-
ner. The male subject’s moral and spiritual capacity is assured through his
assumption of the common masculine identity of breadwinner: work ensures
that he always shares a like identity with other men, and with the environ-
ment he inhabits: “The men formed a united class. They had a purpose in
common. The women were in a class with boys and with children. They had
nothing in common but their physical inferiority to man” (160). It is not
merely that Van Vorst ignores male class relations or gender relations among
the working-class, but rather that her figuring of women’s spatial placement
depends on masculinity as a defining background, a unified category of sta-
bility against which the adventuring American female subject enters into the
“attractions” (74) of machine labor, as opposed to the “attractions” of repro-
duction and the home.
It is not surprising, then, that Van Vorst’s concern with the U.S.-born
female subject’s neglect of the home should manifest itself in a sentimen-
talizing of “poor couples of the older generation” (105), farming couples
dislocated by industrialization who keep boarders and lodgers in Perry and
Chicago. Their devotion to one another is figured in light of those “ideals”
that define her own class. And in that devotion Van Vorst locates the regen-
eration she seeks at the mill-town, ending the Perry section with a descrip-
tion of one such couple: “His glance traveled back over a long vista of years
seen to them as their eyes met, invisible to those about—years that had glo-
rified confidence in this life as it passed and transfigured it into the promise
of another life to come” (98). The author’s description of this transcendent
domestic unity ends the Perry section with a “promise” of spiritual transfor-
mation through a shared partnership between man and woman, and reiter-
ates, and is reiterated again in the narrative, through Van Vorst’s use of italics
in her description of men and women “falling”(90, 127) together, images
Journeys into Urban Interiors 35

of the united domestic group that the native born female subject has aban-
doned. If Perry represents a pivotal space where feminine America might
turn toward regeneration, Chicago represents the straying female subject’s
final, erring, destination. Van Vorst’s arrival in Chicago inverts this promise
of renewal—indicating how far from the “ideal” that makes transfiguration
possible is the urban culture in which she finds herself. Chicago represents a
spiritual death beyond the physical sacrifice dramatized in Pittsburgh: a living
hell of “miserable, overcrowded tenement houses” where children “cluster in
the gutter,” and the “blocks and blocks and tenements” are like “prison walls.”
From her tenement lodgings Van Vorst describes the city as a “hot, human
multitude” saturated with “[t]he breath of the black, sweet night . . . fetid,
heavy with the odour of death as it bl[ows] across the stockyards” (108).
Chicago represents the move away from a feminine America based on “old
world” spiritual and aesthetic values. And, if in Perry Van Vorst is most con-
cerned with industrialization’s perversion of the female subject’s drive toward
reproduction, then, in Chicago, it is the disordered aesthetics of the city that
seem to collude in not only the working-girl’s perversion, but to represent a
threat to the women of Vorst’s own class as well.
In Chicago, Van Vorst’s employments are symptomatic of her increas-
ing preoccupation with the aesthetics of the urban. She works as a handsewer
in a theatrical costume shop; as a framer in an art manufactory; and, finally,
as a press operator in a print shop. Working in places of the mass reproduc-
tion of culture—the cheap art production warehouse, the morally debilitat-
ing and unclean hand sewing factory, the dangerous press machine churning
out reams of cheap advertisement flyers—Van Vorst finds herself on the pro-
duction side of the urban aesthetic that imitates, inverts, and threatens to
debase the American home. Van Vorst’s narrative plotting unravels as she
travels through the city taking on jobs that have taken over woman’s cultural
labor in the American landscape; the purpose of her journey into the “other”
world seems to be forgotten. Whereas she began her journey hoping to help
the working-girl, she now appears increasingly threatened by both the urban
environment that surrounds her and the women who inhabit that environ-
ment.
And, as the author searches for a job amidst the clamor of industrial-
ism, an image similar to the one of Niagara Falls demonstrates how threaten-
ing the urban environment is, not merely to the notion of the middle-class
home defined by reproduction, but to the female body itself:

The address took me to a more fashionable side of the city, near the lake;
a wide expanse of pale, shimmering water, it lay a refreshing horizon for
36 Keeping Up Her Geography

eyes long used to poverty’s quarters. . . . Free from man’s disfiguring

touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared bridelike through a veil of morning
mist. And at its very brink are the turmoil and confusion of America’s
giant industries. (129)

This passage represents industrialism as overwhelmingly “disfiguring” to the

spiritual, aesthetic, and physical purity that Van Vorst’s associates with the
ideal woman.
Increasingly, Van Vorst draws a parallel between the disordered aesthet-
ics of the city and the disordered interiority of the female subject: “Pawn-
shops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water fountains were ranged side
by side on this highway, as the necessity for them is ranged with incongruous
proximity in the existence of those who live pell-mell in moral and mate-
rial disorder after the manner of the poor”(143). This disorder of the urban
environment manifests itself in the incongruity between the female subject’s
exterior and her inner body/self. Watching a group of office workers, who
wear their “showy” costumes with the “air of manikins,” nibble on cakes at
lunch, the author declaims against this class that “idolizes” the material to
the detriment of their health:

They were self-supporting women—independent; they could use their

money as they liked. . . . they each spent a prinking five minutes
before the mirror, adjusting the trash with which they had bedecked
themselves exteriorly while their poor hard-working systems went ungar-
nished and hungry within. . . . What sort of women are those who
sacrifice all on the altar of luxury. . . . What harmony can there be
between the elaborate get-up of those young women and the miserable
homes where they live? (my italics; 112–13)

Van Vorst establishes parallels between the exterior female body and the
urban environment and the inner body and the home in this passage. The
female consumer and the female worker become one in a disastrous dishar-
mony of exterior and interior. Vanity consumes the office worker just as the
“shrine” of the factory consumes the body of the working-girls in Pittsburgh
and Perry, but this is a feeding from within, a wasting of the body at the
expense of health and the social environment in which they live. Here, the
working-girl is both worshiper of gain, and consumer of her own body. The
female subject appears as a manikin, a moral vacancy cheaply imitative of an
“ideal” that creates an incongruence between her appearance in the city and
the home Van Vorst assumes she should represent. Van Vorst desires to bring
Journeys into Urban Interiors 37

order to the disordered female, to reestablish the domestic hearth that has
been absorbed, along with its members, into the industrialized city. More to
the point, she desires to fill the moral vacancy within the female subject with
the spiritual aesthetic and reproductive values of the home, so that woman’s
interiority is evidenced—once again—according to her ability to exteriorize
the home that “fills” her.
The author’s text, then, is consumed by the disharmony—figured now
as an aesthetic wasting equated with the moral and physical sterility of the
female body—that urbanization creates between the home environment and
the woman who represents it. Van Vorst’s concern with the moral entrapment
that the brutalized body suffers leads her back to the female body as a site of
“waste” in the city. The girl who works for luxuries is a perverted inversion
of both the imprisoning body of the female who must work and the urban
environment in which she lives: vacant within she absorbs the trash of the
streets, becoming the very embodiment of waste. Whereas in Pittsburgh the
brutalized female breadwinner wastes her body for the regeneration of the
American spirit, here, the female subject is merely, only, waste.
As a corrective to this wasting of the inner female self, Van Vorst argues
that the female breadwinner and nonbreadwinner must be spatially segre-
gated from one another. In particular, the nonbreadwinner should be “lifted”
from the “slavish, brutalizing machines . . . ignorant of anything better”
and “placed by education and by cultivation in positions of comparative
freedom—freedom of thought, taste, and personality. . . . forming a new,
higher, superior class of industrial art labourers” who can perform their labor
in the home (162). This solution is an import from the Old World, an idea
modeled on the work of the Empress of Russia and Queen Margherita of
Italy. This new class of female laborers would make items to beautify the
American home, items that the middle-class consumer must now import
from abroad. Van Vorst’s narrative progression, however, draws a metaphori-
cal relation between the “goods” that middle-class consumers “are obliged to
send to Europe for when we wish to beautify our homes” (156) and the fail-
ure of her own classes’ “ideal” to purify the “stagnant scum” that it imports
to fill its factories, the failure of the purification process to act as a founda-
tion for “feminine America.”
According to Van Vorst, the generational process of Americanization
that churns out native-born females with too much American (masculine)
spirit is inverted in the disordered aesthetics of the urban environment—so
that the immigrant woman takes on the appearance of the “ideal.” This aes-
thetic inversion—in which the immigrant woman takes on the appearance
of the “ideal” American female—emerges in two images of the immigrant
38 Keeping Up Her Geography

female subject as an object of transformation in the city. The first is a display

window manikin that Van Vorst describes immigrant women as admiring
with envious eyes: “From the store window wax figures of the ideal woman,
clad in the latest Parisian garb. . . . Did she not plainly say to them, ‘For
$17 you can look as I do?’” (my italics; 144). The second image, however,
is an inversion of the first as Van Vorst examines a group of female Italian
immigrants, not merely as they stand before her but as they once appeared
to Van Vorst in her travels through Italy: “In becoming prosperous Ameri-
cans, animated by the desire for material possession which is the strength
and the weakness of our countrymen, they lost the character that pleases
us, the beauty we must go abroad to find” (my italics; 145). This phrase con-
nects the Old World, as a symbol of the production of aesthetic goods that
Americans must import, and the “stagnant scum” that comes from the Old
World to be purified. At this point in the narrative, the roles of Old and New
have been inverted: the aesthetic objects of the Old World are made impure
by their immersion in the consumer environment of the urban neighbor-
hood. The ritual of purification through which the immigrant working-girl
body becomes American has not transfigured her into an “American beauty”
which can be cultivated but into a spectacle of disfigurement that represents,
finally, a mockery of Van Vorst’s own ideal self.
The stagnant scum have not been purified through the sacrifice of
the body, but have merely borrowed the raiments of the “ideal” so that they
mimic Van Vorst’s own class. Arraigned in their cheap imitations of Van
Vorst’s “good” clothing (11), they collapse the distance between the “old”
world, immigrant woman and the “woman of the world.” For it is as “a
woman of the world”(11) that Van Vorst makes the comparison between the
immigrant’s position as spectator and mimic of her own “ideal” self and her
position as a spectacle against which she can measure her own mobility as
a female subject of the “fortunate class.” Whereas, as she moves about the
world, the immigrant’s “picturesque” qualities define Van Vorst’s own mobil-
ity, her ability to move freely in the world, now she sees them moving freely
in her world, while her own “ideal” self occupies the position of spectacle as
the manikin in the window. In this disordered aesthetic of the urban environ-
ment distinctions between the world of the “ideal” and the “other” world are
difficult to maintain, destabilizing and threatening the middle-class woman’s
place within American culture.
The “desperate reality” that Van Vorst claims for her experience may
be nothing more than the horror of mingling her own body with those
determined to “mirror” her in form, if not substance, at seeing the artwork
“framed” on her own walls cheaply reproduced for the consumption of
Journeys into Urban Interiors 39

others, her own desire to be in print mocked by the cheap advertisements

and handbills copiously churned out for indiscriminate readers; her own
“ideal” self window displayed and integrated into the pell-mell aesthetics of
immigrant breadwinners and independent office workers mingling in the
urban environment.
Whereas at the beginning of the narrative, Van Vorst feels that the dis-
tance between herself and the working-girl is so great as to require the meta-
phor of two worlds, at this point in the narrative Van Vorst must distinguish
herself from these women who appear as distorted images of her exterior self.
She takes particular pains to tell her readers about a fellow boarder who stud-
ies music on “borrowed money.” Van Vorst sarcastically refers to her as the
“mundane” of the house, and scorns her luxurious dress, and social and cul-
tural pretensions. The oddness of Van Vorst’s complaint against the woman,
however, is revealed only by Van Vorst’s assumption of the working-girl
voice, as if she, herself, were not passing: “It was evident from my wretched
clothes and poor grammar that I was not accustomed to ladies of her type”
(125). There is no narrative intervention from Van Vorst that might turn the
irony of her position relative to the “mundane” into a comedy of inversion
or a moment of self-recognition that would lead readers to understand how
Van Vorst as a female subject locates herself in relation to the “mundane.”
Van Vorst’s passing is acceptable as a form of physical disguise that does not
disrupt her own world; the “mundane” ’s passing, however, is dangerous pre-
cisely because only Van Vorst sees the young woman as passing; others do
not perceive her as a cheap and imitative version of the real woman of the
world, Van Vorst.
Van Vorst is able, ironically, to preserve and present her interior self
for the reader only by retreating completely into her working-girl guise; if
the “real” working-girl refuses to conform to Van Vorst’s sentimental vision
of interiority, then Van Vorst will perform that injured role herself, her
“wretched clothes” and “poor grammar” manifesting her ideal of how the
working-girl should appear. This denunciation of the non-ideal working-girl
is also an attempt to recover the middle-class female subject’s difference—the
interiority that lifts her above, and makes it possible for her to know, the
working-girl.
Van Vorst implicitly asks how to make manifest the ideal interior self
that defines the middle class woman in this urban environment where the
home no longer represents a stable and distinguishing reference point for the
exteriorization of the female self. Describing herself as a “woman of the world”
at the beginning of her journey and representative of that class in which the
“ideal” supersedes consideration of the demands of the material, it is the
40 Keeping Up Her Geography

distorted appropriation of her own self image within the urban environment
that finally manifests how the tendencies of this “new” society affect the
women of Van Vorst’s own class. The author who initially receives so much
pleasure from being recognized as both a lady and a mill-hand ultimately
represents the urban environment as threatening precisely because it offers
such a dual identity to the working-girl: if the “mundane” has assumed,
within the urban environment, the appearance of the “ideal,” how does the
elite female subject exteriorize that interior self that marks her difference? If
it is only the elite female subject who can perceive the disharmony between
the female subject’s appearance and the home that she should represent, then,
how does the woman of the world establish her differentiated place within
the urban environment?
The untouched interiority of the middle-class female maintains itself
through the ironic assumption of a cultural authority and mobility that
Van Vorst would deny her class of adopted industrial art laborers. Van Vorst
explicitly figures her investigation as an inhabitance of the other’s body in
the opening pages of the text, when she encounters the gateman at the train
station:

I get no farther than the depot when I observe that I am being treated
as though I were ignorant and lacking in experience. As a rule the gate-
man says a respectful “To the right” or “To the left,” and trusts to his
well-dressed hearer’s intelligence. . . . [but] I had divested myself of
a certain authority along with my good clothes, and I had become one
of a class which, as the gateman had found out, and as I found out later
myself, are devoid of all knowledge of the world and, aside from their
manual training, ignorant of all subjects. (my italics; 12)

Although Van Vorst’s insistence on her eventual confirmation of the gate-

man’s perspective may be seen as giving away the ending, it also assures the
reader that Van Vorst will return, not merely redressed in the “good clothes”
that designate her as a female member of the “fortunate” class, but with the
added cultural authority of the gateman. The “gateman,” as a mediator of
direction, helps others reach their correct destination. And, thus, he acts as a
figure for the author herself, who hopes to point both the working-girl and
the middle-class reader toward their (spiritual and biological) destinations.
In the process, she manages to create a third world, an intermediate world
that further distances her body and the body of those who might resemble
her from the “brutalizing machine labor,” and the “imitation” ideals that suf-
fuse the urban streets. However, simultaneously, the “destination” that Van
Journeys into Urban Interiors 41

Vorst maps as the female subject’s destiny—based on her desire to save the
biological body for reproduction and the “esthetic improvement of the coun-
try” (158)—forecloses the possibility of this class sharing her authority, since
it requires them to withdraw from the urban environment and become the
regenerative material for her own work: the spiritual, aesthetic, and repro-
ductive reclamation of the middle-class home.
The cultural authority that Van Vorst assumes is the middle-class wom-
an’s authority as social mediator, but Van Vorst’s insistence on reiterating the
middle-class woman’s difference through interiority suggests the extent to
which she feels this power has been vacated, the extent to which the deserted
hearth of the urban environment is a metaphor for the cultural displace-
ment of traditional middle-class female subjectivity. Her narrative reclaims
this authority for the charting of identity precisely through its performance
of this distinction—between herself and the working-girl—and the dangers
of relinquishing such distinctions.
This is one of the reasons that Van Vorst insists on the novelty of her
journey/narrative as that which “has never been done.” By claiming to do
what “has never been done,” Van Vorst reauthorizes the middle-class woman,
truncating the very anxiety that her narrative displays about the female sub-
ject’s meaning in urban culture. The “meaning” of female subjectivity is to
give “meaning”—spiritual and aesthetic—to those who cannot articulate or
discern the meaning of their own lives; in this sense, her doing “what has
never been done” reclaims for the middle-class subject her particularity, her
difference from those subjects who mechanically reproduce and follow the
trajectory of urbanization. Her performance is not merely an investigation of
how to help the working-girl, but an intervention in the downwardly mobile
trajectory of the “American” female subject, who is originally always already
middle class. Her reemergence at the end of the narrative, morally and physi-
cally intact, and able to describe the “meaning of it all” for her middle-class
readers, presents the middle-class woman as the heroine who can read the
urban environment, and therefore, transcend the dangers it represents. And,
perhaps just as importantly, this middle-class heroine is able to redirect the
American female subject back toward the home that represents her destiny.
And, therefore, to save her from those forces that would turn her into a mas-
culine individual, destroying the home as a viable social location for a femi-
nine redefinition of culture.
However, Van Vorst’s insistence on the novelty of her project is not,
in representational terms, correct. Middle-class women writers of popular
storybooks of the era had been imagining similar journeys—with similar
geographical appropriations—at least since the late 1880s. Her deliberate
42 Keeping Up Her Geography

eschewing of these narratives as a context for her own voluntary journey indi-
cates Van Vorst’s desire to ignore or dismiss the possibility that nevertheless
underlies her narrative: the possibility that such downward mobility may be
involuntary, that the middle-class subject might actually “fall” into the world
of the “unfortunate.” It is this prior representational history of the trope of
downward mobility that Dorothy Richardson uses as the cultural context
through which she writes her own story of urban social reform for the work-
ing-girl and attempts to imagine new forms of subjectivity for both work-
ing-class and middle-class female subjects. In the process, Richardson is able
to recontextualize how the home might—must—function differently for the
independent female subject in the urban environment. From the beginning
of her novel, Richardson draws on this popular trope as a context for her nar-
rator/heroine. Richardson’s narrator undertakes her journey from country to
city because she identifies with stories that she has to read of rural girls who
journey to the city in search of work and adventure. Early in the text she
twice refers to the “story-books” and “magazine stories” in which “it is always
so alluring—this coming to a great city to seek one’s fortune . . .” (30).
Once in the city, she finds herself alone and searching for affordable lodg-
ing and employment before she becomes homeless, and she cannot but help
compare her own isolation and poverty to the “stories about girls who lived
in hall bedrooms . . . of what good times they had, or seemed to have”
(80). Richardson’s narrator thus provides a cultural context for her journey
that is lacking in Van Vorst’s text. This cultural context makes explicit what
is merely implied in Van Vorst’s narrative: the journeying of the middle-class
female investigator into the “other” world is itself a cultural trope for explor-
ing the middle-class female subject’s sense of displacement and alienation in
the urban environment. In Richardson’s novel, then, the social reformer is a
working-girl who performs this cultural narrative (of the urban as a site of
downward mobility for the middle-class female subject) in order to rewrite
its ending.6
The beginning of this narrative is the journey from the familial home
that offers a stable identity into an urban environment represented as a
space of destabilizing migrancy. The narrator’s sense of disorientation is
immediate, and, as in Van Vorst’s narrative, the urban is defined by its lack
of a domestic environment. The physical spaces that the unnamed narrator
inhabits are places “now called home” that provide neither the security
nor the identity for which the narrator searches when she enters the city,
but are merely provisional places of inhabitance. Whereas Vorst is able to
maintain her sense of identity against the urban environment that threatens
her, Richardson’s narrator is not. Rather, it is the search for a new identity,
Journeys into Urban Interiors 43

and new identifications through which to represent female subjectivity, that

inform the narrator’s journey into the city.
And, yet, contemporary critics tend to stabilize both narrator and nar-
rative identity in the novel by reading it as a social problem text, and viewing
the narrator as simply Richardson herself. Critics have tended to linger over
the historical accuracies or inaccuracies of Richardson’s novel.7 Her ability to
record the working-girl and the urban environment in which she lives with
vivid detail arouses critics’ admiration, even as they tend to dismiss the novel
as transparently representing the “middle-class bias” of its author. Blanche
Gelfant seems to define subsequent critical approaches to the novel when
she argues that Richardson’s novel should not be considered a city novel but
a social problem text. Comparing it to Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, she argues that
Sister Carrie “is concerned with a total way of life . . . it interprets city
life as a social structure, while the problem novel records, in a more photo-
graphic manner, only the symptoms of a particular urban disorder” (8). And,
yet, Richardson and Dreiser access the urban through the same “symptom”
of disorder: the native-born rural girl, newly arrived in the city. This access-
ing of the urban environment through the same figure suggests that the
canonical urban novel and the social problem text are themselves contiguous
products of a similar cultural organization of space—one that, as in Vorst’s
text, pushes forward the working-girl as a manifestation of the “tendencies”
of urbanization.
Furthermore, Richardson, if not her narrator, seems quite aware that
her autobiographical subject is a cultural “type” familiar to U.S. readers,
and useful precisely because of her recognizability. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is
referenced sardonically early in Richardson’s text when the novice narrator
is hailed as “Carrie” by an experienced hand at the factory. This hailing of
Richardson’s first person narrator as the fictional greenhorn country-girl of
Dreiser’s novel signifies both Richardson’s recognition of her narrator as a
figure already written into the culture as a type, and the significance of read-
ing in the text. The author articulates the “reality” of her narrator’s experi-
ence precisely by invoking its resemblances to the texts of popular culture
that constitute the female subject’s library. Richardson’s novel is saturated
with moments such as these that foreground the relation between fictional
representations of the native-born female subject’s entrance into the urban
environment and her autobiographical-reformist narrative. I argue that
Richardson’s cross-genre narrativizing offers a context for understanding
how social reform narratives such as Van Vorst’s, canonical novels such as
Dreiser’s, and mass-marketed romances share a common spatial troping of
the relation between class, gender, and the urban that understands the urban
44 Keeping Up Her Geography

working-girl as a “fallen” native middle-class subject rather than as a subject

emerging from specific historical and social conditions.
The narrator’s first job, after arriving in New York from rural Pennsyl-
vania, is at a box-making factory. Here, she and her new coworkers carry on
a lengthy discussion of their tastes in books. This scene has been glossed over
by critics as merely an example of Richardson’s middle-class snobbishness
toward the “Laura Jean Libbey School” of fiction that her fellow workers love
to read. However, this extended scene is more complex than it first appears,
particularly when read in the context of the mass-marketed fiction that it
references.
Mass produced storybooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century were popular with working-class and middle-class women. Drawing
upon both the gothic and sentimental traditions of the previous era, they fea-
tured late adolescent heroines who repeatedly found themselves in physical
and moral peril. As in the genres they incorporate these heroines are usually
imaged as orphaned, but storybook heroines are repeatedly orphaned: not
only do they lose one or both parents in infancy or childhood, but as young
women they often lose guardians to death, or are abandoned and rejected by
those to whose care they have been entrusted. Raised in country villas, man-
sions, or farms they find themselves alone in the world—forced to the city in
search of work or guardianship. Contemporary critics recognize the romance
heroine’s privileged origins. And, yet, despite their recognition that these
heroines usually do not work and are not from working-class backgrounds,
they continue to read these novels as working-girl fiction, suggesting that
working women must have identified with the heroine’s eventual marriage to
a wealthy and handsome suitor and fantasized about their chances of expe-
riencing this romantic upward mobility.8 But as my summary of their plots
indicate these books do not image upwardly mobile marriage, but merely
return the heroine to her rightful place. The wrong of her displacement is
corrected in the novel’s happy ending. The popular storybook resembles the
texts of the reformers examined here: the urban environment represents the
middle-class female subject’s displacement from the protections and privi-
leges promised by a culture based on inheritance and secured through the
female subject’s cultural identification with the home.
These novels trope the female subject’s family and class displacement
as a geographic trajectory ending in her alienated position within the urban
environment. This function of the novels is underscored by Libbey’s extrava-
gance in bestowing upon her heroines a respectable and often wealthy birth-
right that is returned to her before her marriage to her male equivalent. One
of Libbey’s books makes this geographic trajectory explicit. In The Alphabet
Journeys into Urban Interiors 45

of Love (1892) the heroine’s stepmother pays two criminals from the city
to claim the villa-bred Southern heroine as their long lost daughter. Lib-
bey describes at great length, and repeatedly, the incomprehensible distance
between the “ill-bred” and “coarse” impostors and the gentile heroine who
appear to inhabit “two different worlds” (94). So the urban environment
stands in for the middle-and/or- upper class female subject’s displacement
from the protections guaranteed by her birthplace on the farm or in the villa;
if, eventually, she is returned to her rightful place as heiress, wife, and mistress
of her own home, the plot outlines not the rise of the working-girl, but the
middle and upper class female’s replacement within the family/class identity
(and one is nothing without the other) that makes her marriage possible.
The authors of the storybook romance give their fairy-tale plots cul-
tural relevancy when they incorporate urbanization into their plot as a mani-
festation of the female subject’s displacement from the home. Similarly, when
Richardson incorporates other texts into her narrator’s experience of the city
she both signifies the cultural context within which her own journey occurs,
and points to the importance of reading in the middle-class female’s experi-
ence of the urban environment. In Van Vorst’s text industrialization orga-
nizes the female subject’s place in the city. In Richardson’s story, it is stories
themselves that plot the female subject’s position. The competing narratives
of the box-making factory are a manifestation of the differing cultural expec-
tations of the narrator and her fellow workers. These differences are under-
stood as geographic, playing on the narrator’s rural innocence. That these
differences are also aligned with class and, often, ethnicity may be elided by
the geographic metaphor. However, this also makes difference available to
the reader in a way that it is not available to a reader of Van Vorst’s text. Van
Vorst does not present how the working-girls perceive the author’s difference
from themselves. The very lack of interiority that Van Vorst perceives—and
fears—in her journey is reflected in her inability to narrate the very difference
she seeks to define. However, in The Long Day, the journey into the city, the
closing of the physical distance between rural narrator and the urban female
subject, is not enough to transform Richardson into a working-girl; she is
consistently troped as different from the working-girls she meets. According
to her coworkers, the narrator talks, walks, and reads in “funny” ways.
When Mrs. Smith and her friend Phoebe discover that the unnamed
narrator has never read any of their favorite storybooks, Mrs. Smith launches
into a detailed description of the plot of her favorite, Little Rosebud’s Lovers.
This plot, related in the context of the country narrator’s own greenhorn
position in the city, is significant for two reasons. At the suggestion of her
coworker Henrietta Manners, the narrator will assume the storybook name
46 Keeping Up Her Geography

Rose Fortune the next day—the only name by which the reader will ever know
her. And, the plot of this novel consistently resembles a typical storybook plot,
except for the fatal ending that befalls the heroine. The plot of Little Rosebud’s
Lovers, and the discussion that follows its telling, questions both contemporary
critics’ reading of this fiction and the narrator’s reading practices. Rosebud’s end-
ing deviates dramatically from that of most storybooks. After a harrowing flight
to the city in search of her aunt, the disowned Rosebud dies from fright while
trying to escape the villain of the book; she never sees her lover, her country
mansion, or her fortune again. The story functions, not as a fulfillment of the
middle-class female subject’s desire to return to the security of her cultural place,
to find virtue rewarded, and at the end of the perilous journey into the city, to
reemerge morally and physically intact, but rather as a warning to those subjects
who identify with such heroines. The narrator, of course, has come to the city
because she identifies with the heroines in her reading; but the fatal ending of
“Little Rosebud” mocks her romantic and homebound expectations.
However, her working-class counterparts do not read through a structure
of identification; they do not take storybook heroines for “true.” Our narra-
tor follows up this startling rehearsal of Rosebud’s decline with her recital of
the plot of one of her favorite books, Little Women. Her coworkers respond by
questioning the appropriateness of Alcott’s selection of material, insisting that
Alcott probably knew all the people in the book, and merely wrote about what
happened to them. To the box-factory workers Little Women is no story at all,
but merely a record of “everyday happenings” (86). Later, the narrator scoffs
at her coworkers’ reading of storybook romances because, “they have not suf-
ficient imagination to invest their hard-working, sweat-grimed sweethearts
with any halo of romance” (73). Our narrator, like contemporary critics, mis-
reads the purposes of reading for her coworkers. While our narrator—soon to
be author—obviously identifies with the heroine Jo March, her coworkers do
not identify with their heroines, at least not in the same manner. More obvi-
ously, the narrator ignores the dangers of identification inherent in the unhappy
ending of Little Rosebud’s story when she suggests that her coworkers should
endow their male counterparts with the romance of the storybook hero. Both
the reliability of the narrator’s way of reading and the dangers of misreading the
urban environment, of taking “fairy” stories for “true,” are immediately plotted
in the episode that follows, what we might call the book’s undermining of the
storybook plot, even as it insists on the narrator’s very living of that plot through
her own orphaned and perilous experience of the city.
Finding herself homeless, the narrator accepts fellow worker Henrietta
Manner’s offer to share her room. Hardworking Henrietta tells the narrator her
own tragic story of disinheritance, orphaning, and, finally, her expulsion from
Journeys into Urban Interiors 47

the ancestral home and into the workplace. And she encourages our narrator to
ditch her own ugly name and call herself Rose Fortune, after a storybook hero-
ine. This renaming of our narrator in effect turns her into just such a heroine,
writes her into a cultural plot that she does not control, and indicates her sense
of disempowerment within the urban environment.
Henrietta’s life story mimics the storybook heroine’s tale. But the nar-
rator’s acceptance of the story as true questions the reliability of the middle-
class female’s negotiation of the urban environment. If Van Vorst insists on the
importance of distinguishing between “a woman of the world” and the “pass-
ing mundane,” this narrator reveals how difficult it is to make this distinction.
Moreover, the same structure of identification that causes Van Vorst to see and
fear herself as the object of mimicry, structures our narrator’s willingness to
believe Henrietta. At first glance, Henrietta appears more like herself than the
other workers in the factory: Henrietta’s tale of downward mobility is an exag-
gerated version of the narrator’s own story. So, Rose, despite her increasing fears,
follows Henrietta to her new home.
Through increasingly “dark, devious paths” the narrator follows Henri-
etta to the “most wretched of all the wretched houses” and into her small and
dilapidated room (121–22). The room is a spatial manifestation of the female
subject’s displacement as imaged in the storybook:

The heavily carved woodwork hinted of the fact that it had once been a
lady’s bedchamber in the bygone days when this was a fashionable quar-
ter of New York, and its fireplace. . . . [was] surmounted by a mantel of
Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus’s boon to mankind,
and supported on either end by caryatids in the shape of vestal virgins bear-
ing flaming brands in their hands. (124)

The vestal virgins, “once spotless” but “now sadly soiled,” support not only the
rows of perfume bottles that Henrietta’s lover brings her, but also the illegal
drugs that she takes. The ancestral home on the wall that Henrietta claims for
her own is an easily recognizable mass produced picture of a castle on the Rhine.
Not only does the room represent the female subject’s downward mobility in
its shrinking confinement and degradation, it also represents that downfall as
imaged in the storybook as counterfeit, a cheaply circulated fantasy, like Hen-
rietta’s claim to an ancestral home and the “romances of the Laura Jean Libbey
school of fiction”(140) that sit upon her bookshelf. However, it also indicates
Richardson’s desire to retell the story of this fall—through the narrator—as a
reality: as the motivation for the social reform narrative. This moment mirrors,
then, the moment in Van Vorst’s text when she feels her own identity threatened
48 Keeping Up Her Geography

as she sees her own self “falsely” mimicked in the streets and in the Chicago
boardinghouse. Only the narrator does not see this as a mimicry of self, of an
already culturally written, and therefore suspect, story, but as a mimicry of the
fantasies of the storybook.
“Rose”’s downfall occurs because of that of which she accuses her cowork-
ers: poor reading. Taking storybook fantasy for “true,” too late she realizes the
falseness of Henrietta’s claims to a gentrified background. Her imagination
invests Henrietta with the “halo of romance.” Because she identifies with Henri-
etta’s story of downward mobility, she not only misreads Henrietta, but her own
place—as a “good” reader—within the urban environment. She is not, as Van
Vorst presents herself, a reader capable of distinguishing one class of women
from another; she is more akin to the storybook heroine whose failure to read
the urban environment results in her moral and physical peril. Moreover, the
narrator’s encounter with Henrietta, since it is contextualized within the “truth”
of the reformer’s autobiographical narrative, takes on the aura of everyday hap-
penings and confronts the middle-class reader with her own failed ability to
read the urban environment she now inhabits. When the narrator takes the sto-
rybook tale for “true,” she becomes the kind of heroine she earlier mocked.
The narrator, however, in much the same way that Van Vorst uses her nar-
rative to perform the middle-class female subject’s difference from the working-
girl, interjects her future “reading” of Henrietta into this episode. As Henrietta
and the narrator are walking to Henrietta’s squalid room, the future reformer
and author feels it necessary to both excuse her gullibility in going home with
Henrietta, and reinterpret Henrietta from her more educated present:

In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can now see in that long,
slouching shuffling figure, in that tallow-colored face with the bloodless,
loose lips and the wandering, mystic eyes. . . . a congenital failure; a
female creature doomed from her mother’s womb—physically, mentally,
and morally doomed.

I was, however, on this memorable Easter Eve most happily innocent of

my Lombroso and my Mantagazza, else I had not been walking home
with Henrietta Manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated
country-girl. (120–21)

Henrietta has been characterized by the author both as a romantic heroine,

and her fallen counterpart—a gothic anti-heroine that steers the displaced
heroine toward moral and physical peril. And yet, while persisting in this
representation of Henrietta, the author must also put her into a “proper
Journeys into Urban Interiors 49

perspective;” with the help of scientific reading she places Henrietta into
a reformist context that can both explain Henrietta and her own misread-
ing of the girl’s character. Rose distances herself from the experience of her
own identification with Henrietta and her identification with the romantic
fictions of the storybook heroine, but she can do so only through the per-
spective of a future reader who has located other texts for understanding the
female working-girl.
The narrator continues to incorporate the structures of the story-
book plot into her narrative, even as she gestures toward the falseness of
their ability to act as a context for the working-girl’s story; the storybooks
that have brought her to the city become a counterpoint to the reality of
the author’s narrative. When her friend Eunice, a fallen woman who has
lost the desire to live, slips away into the dark night, Rose admonishes
her readers not to expect to discover Eunice’s fate: “It is only in stories
that such things are made clear, usually, and this was only an incident in
real life” (228). And, later, a young man tells the narrator and her friend
that the woman he chooses for a wife need not be pretty: “‘Them things
don’t make much difference only in story papers’” (255). This insistence
on the difference between her own narrative and fictional stories is a way
of distancing “Rose” from “Rosebud” and of separating the romance plot
from the author’s attempt to redefine the female subject as a worker. The
narrator could be writing of herself when she claims in her Epilogue that
“[g]irls fed upon such mental trash are bound to have distorted and false
views of everything”(300). Similarly, she insists that educators must pan-
der to the “very primitive feminine liking for identity” by providing them
with stories “not too far removed from the real and the actual” if they
wish to compete for working-girls’ literary attention (301). But are stories
of the “real and the actual” stories like Little Women of “everyday hap-
penings,” or stories like those of little Rosebud, the fantastic stories that
Phoebe, Mrs. Smith, and Henrietta read? The “primitive feminine liking
for identity” that the narrator argues underlies women’s reading practices
describes her own reading practices, and not those of her coworkers. Side-
stepping the issue of class differences in reading and the question of which
class to whom she is addressing herself, the author’s own narrative strate-
gies are designed to incorporate both types of stories in order to produce
a new female reader.
In short, the narrator seems to suggest that educators should provide
reading such as The Long Day: urban narratives in which the reform plot
and the storybook plot are neatly interwoven in order to produce a differ-
ent kind of female reader, a different kind of female subject. The shaping of
50 Keeping Up Her Geography

experience into the reform narrative is much like the guidelines for working-
girls’ reading. The appropriation of the storybook romance lays a foundation
for identification with the narrator as a heroine, while the author’s redirect-
ing of its stereotypical plot allows her to reposition that identification for
the middle-class reader. The reform narrative’s aim is to rewrite the power-
less plotting of the downwardly mobile romance heroine and her ending in
domesticity or in Rosebud’s case, death.
The restructuring of identification, however, is much more difficult
than it appears. The middle-class subject must descend into a space of non-
identity before she can experience the depths of her downward mobility as
a working-girl. In the end, Rose finds herself forced into the most degraded
work of the city, working as a mangler in a steam laundry. This environment
represents, once again, the detrimental positioning of the female subject in
the industrial city. Just as Chicago represents a kind of aesthetic hell for Van
Vorst, the steam laundry has a similar function in The Long Day. The female
body is deformed by the mechanization of traditionally female labor, but she
is also subject to physical and moral degradation within the closely confined
space of the laundry. The women discard their shoes and outerclothing in
the thick heat, while shirtless and shoeless black men sweat over their work,
and the “queen bee,” the Boss’s lover and a glistening blonde whose beauty is
heightened by the steam of the laundry, manages everything. The only men
who work in the laundry—with the exception of the foreman—are black
men. And the narrator’s overtly sexual description of these men, as well as her
indignation that white men refuse to work in the place, signifies her under-
standing of this enforced association as a mark of her sexual and economic
degradation as a white woman. However, it is not the black men who repre-
sent a problem for the narrator, but the white boss who assumes that the nar-
rator will exchange sexual favors for a promotion. This sexual threat seems
to form a sort of narrative wall for Richardson. The narrator will not—can
not—explore the overt sexual content of the working-girl’s story. As in the
storybook heroine’s tale, this is the narrative turning point; the heroine must
succumb to the villain, commit suicide, or—as is usually the case—be saved
so she can return to her rightful place, marry, and leave the city.
The narrator flees when she discovers that the Boss’s attentions are sex-
ual and not related to her superior efficiency in the workroom. The middle-
class identity with which she began her narrative has been shattered by the
degradation of the laundry, represented, finally, by the sexual threat of both
her surroundings and her employer: “ . . . I walked on, all unconscious
of where I was going, or of my own identity” (264). This, as Richardson
describes it in the epilogue, is the general state of the working women of the
Journeys into Urban Interiors 51

city: they work on, apathetic toward their fate and their surroundings; uncon-
scious of themselves as workers they are worked as machines are worked.
This reduction of the working-girl/middle-class subject to a machine with-
out identity opens up a narrative space, however, for Richardson’s rewriting
of the urban female subject.
Richardson attempts to pander both to the “very primitive feminine
liking for identity” that defines middle-class women’s reading by providing
a heroine that resembles themselves and to use that identification to create a
new subject position for the female subject and for herself. Rather than fol-
low the romantic plot that replaces the heroine in the social order, Richard-
son suggests new modes of identification for both the working-girl and the
middle-class female subject. In her epilogue, Richardson tells her readers that
no book has had more effect upon her thinking than Booker T. Washington’s
Up from Slavery. And it is an identification, she says, with the Afro-American
worker that will turn the female subject into an urban worker worthy of her
economic rights:

. . . she is as new to the idea of what it really means to work as is

the Afro-American citizen. The comparison may not be flattering to
our vanity, but after a reading of Booker Washington’s various exposi-
tions of the industrial abilities of the negro, I cannot but be convinced
that the white working woman is in a corresponding process of evolu-
tion. . . . (279)

Richardson saves this identification, however, until the end of her story pre-
cisely because it represents a new kind of identification for her and for white
wage-earning women. She turns the forced racial-gendered segregation of the
laundry, which previously angered her, into a tentative identification that she
knows her readers will find offensive, and that previously she herself saw as a
measure of her debasement. The author’s reference to “our vanity” is one of
the few instances in the epilogue in which she includes herself among work-
ing women.9
The race and gender segregation of the workplace forces the narrator
into a position of proximity with the African-American male worker. How-
ever, it is the textual separation of self and other that allows the narrator to
make meaning of the experience, and to make an identification across race
that might alienate her white readers: “ . . . with the appearance of the
first fruits of authorship—part of the horror and loathing of that unhappy
period of servitude fell away from me; the sordid suffering, the hurt to pride,
the ineffaceable scar on heart and soul I felt had not been in vain” (273). In
52 Keeping Up Her Geography

Van Vorst’s and Richardson’s texts the reformist model is dependent upon
an aesthetic sense of the female subject as capable of defining herself in rela-
tion to being able to giving meaning to experience. The reformist narrative
allows both to reposition themselves as artists in an environment that prefers
the counterfeit—the “mundane,” Henrietta Manners—to the “everyday hap-
penings” that represent the interiority of the female subject. Van Vorst does
that “which had never been done before” and makes a claim for aesthetics
produced in the home as beyond the imitable cheapness of the mechanically
produced. Richardson’s narrator survives the kind of displacement and dis-
orientation that the storybook heroine experiences only to refute the domes-
tic destiny that those books plot for the middle-class subject and to write
herself as worker.
Richardson rejects the domestic destiny that both Van Vorst and the
storybook authors’ plot for the middle-class female subject, but the narrator
of The Long Day is also clearly dissatisfied with those places that she is asked
to “now call home” within the city. She does not reject the notion of home
as a defining site of female subjectivity, but, rather, wants to locate a home
for working women who must, or choose to, live outside the familial home.
In the end, Richardson is not able to provide her heroine with both a new
identity as a worker and a home that accommodates that identity. When the
narrator escapes from the moral and physical peril of Henrietta’s room, just
as any good Libbey heroine would, she descends further into homelessness.
Rose ends up at The Working Girls’ Home, a site of the home’s institution-
alization—such that Richardson often puts home in quotation marks—and,
thus, a step further down from the deteriorating confines of Henrietta’s lodg-
ings. The entrance into “The Home” is troped as a kind of death for the
female subject. The door has “the gruesome suggestion of a coffin set on
end” (157) and the women’s gray cots are laid out end to end like graves.
Here, Rose enters as an “inmate” and meets the young girls who grow up
under the auspices of the “home”: “They came as little children, and they
went away as women. For them the home was practically a prison” (173).
Furthermore, these minor inmates are exploited as child laborers under the
guise of philanthropy before being turned out into the city to be further
exploited in the streets. The home is based on the idea that only “espionage
and isolation” (219) can ensure the physical and moral safety of the inmates
and has a rigid set of rules that inhibit intimacy between the lodgers. In her
epilogue, Richardson claims that most working-girls “seemed never to have
lived in homes at all” (282).
Richardson’s main concern, then, is not the domestic familial home
whose vacancy Van Vorst laments, but rather the home of the independent
Journeys into Urban Interiors 53

female in the city: the lodging and boarding homes and girls’ homes in which
the working-girl lives alone. The narrator finds permanency and intimacy only
when her friend Minnie Plympton rescues her from the street as she flees the
laundry. She and Minnie enjoy a “happy domestic partnership” (268) which
ends only when Minnie marries, has a baby and moves to “a pretty cottage in
a peaceful suburb” (266). Minnie enjoys the happy domestic ending that the
author rejects for herself, insisting that she will always, must always, be a wage
earner. This insistence on her own status as worker motivates her analysis of
the needs of working-girls’ domestic environment. Specifically, she finds the
“coercive morality” (287) hidden behind the “semblance of charity” to be a
sign of working women’s inequality that is both classed and gendered, noting
that neither men nor upper class women are held to the same constraints
on their conduct. Her female friend, Minnie, pursues a middle-class family
life in a suburban cottage, suggesting to the middle-class reader that the
domestic home can represent a space safe from the inequalities, at home and
at work, which define the urban working-girl’s life. Richardson’s narrative
plotting within the context of the storybook heroine’s tale limits her ability
to examine the relation between the domestic sphere and the social and
economic sites of the urban environment. However, Clara Laughlin uses a
fragmented narrative technique that allows her to bring to the foreground
the connections between the female’s place within the industrial organization
of the city and her place within the home. Laughlin, Richardson, and Van
Vorst agree: the middle-class home does not hold a central place in an early
twentieth century U.S. culture defined by urbanization. Richardson views
the middle-class home as an originating point of departure for the storybook
heroine, whereas Van Vorst sees this as a destination point for the native born
female subject. Yet, neither writer examines the relation between the gendered
ideology of the home and the urban structures which apparently displace it.
Laughlin, however, shows that the gendered structures that define the home
have not been displaced, but have merely been appropriated away from the
middle-class home and the middle-class female subject, and incorporated
into the economic, social, and domestic environments of the city.
In The Work-a-Day Girl (1911), Clara Laughlin analyzes both the
familial home and the single working woman’s home. She addresses the
gendered and classed inequality that working women experience through
an analysis of the relation between the working-girl and the home. Whereas
Richardson rejects the familial home and the institutional home as con-
straints upon women’s full development as working subjects, she does not, as
Laughlin does, argue that the conditions of women’s domestic environments
are directly related to her position within the urban environment. Laughlin
54 Keeping Up Her Geography

argues that if the city creates newly problematic conditions for women, then
these conditions are extensions of unequal conditions already existing in the
home, and that the commercial and industrial spaces of the city exploit this
inequality for profit.
Laughlin’s text is not a continuous narrative of experience, but a col-
lection of essays that the author presents as journalistic in method and writ-
ten in “semi-story” form. This method allows Laughlin to tell representative
stories about different working-girls as dramatic illustrations of the need for
specific reform measures. In her introduction, however, Laughlin gives a nar-
rative context to the essays by claiming that their arrangement reflects an
order of effects leading back to causes. Laughlin writes the history of the
female subject’s emergence into the urban environment and attempts to redi-
rect her toward different “effects.” However, through the trajectory of this
history the working-girl reemerges at the end of the text into a transformed
middle-class female subject. In this analysis, as in Vorst and Richardson, the
journey into the urban environment is imagined as the middle-class woman’s
fall; in Laughlin’s essays, this trajectory is narrated in reverse; so, not only
does the reader understand the working-girl’s unequal position in the urban
environment, but Laughlin traces that inequality back into “the” female sub-
ject’s home and shows how public and private collude in creating inequality
for both the working-girl and her middle-class reader.
Given that the essays move back from effects to causes the female reader
might be dismayed to learn that they begin in the Female Night Court, as
Laughlin narrates the story of a young girl, Florence, picked up for prostitu-
tion while pretending to window shop on Broadway. This story introduces
Laughlin’s middle-class readership to the newly constituted New York night
court for women. The Female Night Court represents an ironic form of prog-
ress for Laughlin, because it symbolizes the organizational effort to “salvage”
the increasing number of young female offenders that the city produces. The
end effect of the representative female subject’s entrance into the urban envi-
ronment is her emergence as an “erring” girl, for whom womanhood means
entering the recently institutionalized spaces of a newly organized urban sys-
tem of organizations to combat criminality, poverty, and immorality among
the female population.
Whereas their male counterparts are usually brought up on property
crimes, most of the females are brought into the court on charges of immo-
rality. In her first two essays, however, Laughlin establishes two connections
that propel the plot of her story: the relation between female immorality and
property and the relation between working-girls and middle-class women. A
middle-class woman appears briefly in the night court when she is brought
Journeys into Urban Interiors 55

before the judge on charges of shoplifting. She is, Laughlin writes, probably
“one of the many who are kept without pocket money by mean husbands”
(30). Her “impassioned plea for secrecy” is granted by the reporters in the
court who print her story without any clues to her identity. The middle-
class defendant’s story of theft will not be presented as part of the overall
conditions of the urban female subject; her presence in the night court is an
aberration. Her crimes remain hidden from a general public examination.
But Laughlin’s narration of her story suggests the relation between property
and immorality connects the middle-class woman and the working-girl. In
the second essay, she more clearly suggests to her middle-class female read-
ers that they, too, are subject to the gendered relation between immorality
and property. Men—like the “mean” husband—mediate women’s relation
to property and that mediation threatens to plunge the middle-class woman
into the public position of immorality that the working-girl occupies:

Some man, their relations with whom have the sanction of society, pays
for their bridge and their finery and their motor-cars and their pink
teas. Only God knows which of these women, if the sanctioned rela-
tionship were to fail, to become impossible of renewal, would forego the
feathers, and which would forego the sanction. (40)

Female morality is an issue of economics not of character, in Laughlin’s anal-

ysis, and it is impossible to clearly delineate the character of the middle-class
woman from that of the working-girl.
In this way, Laughlin connects the middle-class woman’s position in
the home with the working-girl on Broadway. This connection is a place of
identification for Laughlin and part of her narrative method for promoting
reform. She presents realist stories accompanied by passionate defenses of
their working-girl protagonists’ choices and then broadens the essay’s per-
spective, making direct appeals to her middle-class readership to make the
reader’s inclusion in the narrative a part of the text’s transforming properties,
necessary to changing the outcome of the working-girl’s story.
This connection is evidenced in contradictory ways, however. On the
one hand, the middle-class female reader is asked to identify with the work-
ing-girl’s search for romance: “She is a young thing, palpitant with all that
makes youth wonderful. There is almost nothing that she will not dare if
her sensitive pulses are stirred. Nature made her that way, for her own pur-
poses. Maternity calls for sublime daring. Nature takes care of that daring,
jealously”(53–54). Nature does not recognize conventions of class or moral-
ity; and thus, not only is the working-girl’s desire for romance justified but
56 Keeping Up Her Geography

her attraction to the city becomes both desirable and inevitable: “ . . . she
wants to be where there are others like her, loving laughter, wistful for
romance, ardent for adventure, eager to flaunt attractions” (53). If this
seems a rather romantic vision of the working-girl, it also seems necessary to
Laughlin: “The life these girls will enter upon when they marry is unroman-
tic enough—full of toil and poverty and pain and renunciation. . . . The
children of tomorrow ought not to have mothers who never knew Romance”
(55–56). Laughlin asks her middle-class readers to understand the working-
girl not as a female working-class subject, but as a younger version of their
own—most probably married and maternal selves: but, also, to think of the
“probable” mother that the working-girl will become. For, ironically, this
same instinct toward romance leads to the marriage and motherhood that
Laughlin perceives as a dismal, horrific, and even dangerous condition. This
unflattering portrait of marriage and motherhood suggests that the “sal-
vage” work of saving the young woman from falling into the public sphere
as a criminal may consign her to a fate in the private sphere that is no less
miserable.
On the other hand, the middle-class reader is asked to see the home—
her domain—as that space most directly responsible for the working-girl’s
entrance into the urban environment as a criminal. Laughlin makes it clear
in the two essays that follow, “Where the Trouble Begins” and “The Indict-
ment of the Home,” that the familial home threatens to turn out not only
young mothers who “never knew Romance,” but also continually “disgorg[es]
a stunted and misdirected output” (106). Laughlin triumphantly quotes
government statistics on the relation between employment and crime and
discovers that most female offenders come straight from the home, never
having been employed. And she emphasizes the significance of these statistics
by including the stories of delinquent girls of undetermined class origins in
her narrative; they may or may not come from homes that resemble those of
her middle-class readers.
As an example, in “The Indictment of the Home,” Laughlin reports
the story of the sixteen-year-old Lily, her abusive father and cowering
mother. Lily has been brought into the juvenile court because she has run
away from home. She runs away to escape the father who has brought her
into court because she is withholding her wages from him. Because she is not
yet eighteen Lily is judged incapable of living on her own, despite being a
wage earner. She is shunted off to The House of the Good Shepherd, a fate
that arouses horror in Lily—and in courtroom spectators. Instead, however,
of using this essay to question the wisdom of punishing Lily for her father’s
brutality (although Laughlin does indicate that the law seems to care more
Journeys into Urban Interiors 57

for her father’s rights in Lily’s wages than Lily herself ) Laughlin is more inter-
ested in incorporating her middle-class female readership into the story as
citizens.
Laughlin argues that Lily is merely representative of thousands of
young girls brought up in homes where relationships are completely free
from the laws and regulations that define even the most sordid workplace.
The author urges her domestic-bound readers to investigate the “back-door
world” of their own homes. This back-door world is imaged as a Social Set-
tlement where the middle-class reader may prepare herself to become a suf-
frage holder:

Some of you are now voting. In a little while we shall all be

voting. . . . The suffrages of this nation have too long been cast each
in the self-interest of the voter. With your advent into law-making and
law-enactment, will come either a tremendous new spirit or a tremen-
dous impetus to an old one. And one of the first of the great problems
to which you direct yourselves will concern Lily and her ma—millions
of Lilys and their mas. (102)

The middle-class reader is being asked, not to reimagine the working-girl,

but to reimagine her own relation to the urban environment at her door-
step—to see the city as laboratory for her own emergence as a citizen capable
of making laws in the interest of others:

You can run a Social Settlement of your own, at your back-

door. . . . You can learn what conditions are in your own bailiwick;
and you can discover what remedial possibilities exist, what others must
be created. . . . divest your mind of any lingering traces of the notion
that Social Service consists in the giving away of things you don’t want.
It consists in helping people to know their rights and obligations and to
get them; to know their obligations and to discharge them. (104)

The reader is asked to reimagine the social world juxtaposed to and inter-
twined with her home as a political realm subject to laws and law making,
and more subtly to imagine the domestic realm she inhabits as equally sub-
ject to the rights and obligations of this political realm. If the household of
Lily and her ma is subject to the “rights and obligations” of citizenship, then,
so too must be the middle-class home of the reader.
Moreover, “The Indictment of the Home” acts as a transition essay in
Laughlin’s tracing of the cause of the female subject’s decline. It takes readers
58 Keeping Up Her Geography

from the sites of the city—the court, the workplace, the rooming house, and
the girls’ home—into the “family” home where the working-girl is daughter.
In her text, Laughlin brings together the two environments that have been
placed in opposition by Van Vorst and Richardson, claiming that the home
and the factory are actually colluders in the working-girls’ erring ways; in
Laughlin’s analysis home and work do not represent two different destina-
tions, but two similarly structured sites of female subordination. While oth-
ers blame girls going to work for the downfall of the female subject, Laughlin
indicts the position that the girl holds across the spaces of workplace and
home.
As Lily’s case demonstrates, the daughter does not escape the problems
or expectations associated with the home merely by becoming a working-girl.
The next essays detail the ways in which the home intrudes upon the working-
girl in the city, both when she strikes out on her own and when she remains in
the home. If the city’s wage earning opportunities and entertainments seem to
offer a solution to the problems of the “daughter,” Laughlin argues that it only
represents a tenuous foothold of independence from the demands of the home.
She also seeks in this section of the text to dispel any myths about why girls go
to work to earn a wage, to undo the storybook romance’s portrait of the sud-
denly displaced heroine. In “Her Daily Bread” and “The Girl Who Earns $6 a
Week,” Eugenia and Hazel travel from the country to the city to find work that
they cannot get in their small towns. Eugenia does not “‘suddenly find herself
obliged to seek a livelihood,’ like the story-heroines of two and three decades
ago” (107). Yet when she arrives in the city she finds that reformers, employers,
and landladies are all of the same opinion: “the city is no place for girls without
homes” (116). The city in Laughlin’s text is overflowing with girls who are
unable to find work that will keep them. Employers refuse to hire girls who do
not live at home or will hire them at a wage that will only allow them to live at
home. If in Richardson’s text, as in the storybook, the working-girl is imagined
as a heroine, in this story Laughlin makes it clear that the working-girl appears
to the denizens of the city as a “cheap extra.”
And, yet, if readers expect Laughlin to romanticize the home as the
place of return to safety, she does not, but illustrates how finding a home may
merely lead to more difficulties. The story of Hazel narratively dramatizes
the difficulties of the working-girl finding a “way out” (154) on her own.
Hazel leaves her small-town middle-class family and follows her friend, Min-
nie, to the city seeking employment and a romance that will lead to a home
of her own. However, even the temporary home that she makes with Minnie
is disrupted by the gender inequalities brought to bear upon the female ten-
ant. Hazel and Minnie are thrown out of the small room they share because
Journeys into Urban Interiors 59

Minnie dares to entertain her boyfriend there. When they finally locate other
affordable lodgings they are laid off, and Minnie decides she “’can’t live on
hopes and virtue’” (154). Hazel sympathizes with Minnie’s decision, but
refuses to relinquish her notions of a possible future that includes marriage
and home. Their landlady, however, does not push the girls for their rent
when they are laid off because “‘[I] was in your fix a lot o’times before I got
married—that was why I took a chance on him. Good God! We’re in fer it,
whichever way we turn—us women!’” (153). Her sympathetic identification
with the girls as younger versions of herself foreshadows only increasing dif-
ficulty for Hazel and Minnie. When the landlady’s abusive husband strikes
Hazel down the stairs and kills her, as she runs to defend his wife, it is as
if the future reaches out and prematurely destroys her, as if Hazel has been
killed defending her own future self. Hazel’s defense of the ideal of home, as
a site of security, precipitates her own fall down the stairs; the middle-class
female subject as working-girl literally finds herself falling downward into an
urban environment that has no place—at work or in the home—for her.
Laughlin’s next story explicitly indicts the family home. In “Mamie’s
Deficit” the daughter lives at home, but is forced to turn most of her earnings
over to her family even as she is turned out of the house by its overcrowded
conditions. Finding herself pregnant and abandoned, rather than return to
her home, she disappears with a man on the street who claims he will take
care of her: “They [her mother and sister] could not realize that somewhere,
somehow, little Mamie was in bondage—in bondage to threats, to force, or
to persuasion that she was an outcast and in the kind of place where she
would henceforth be tolerated” (197). These stories are not only about the
dangers of the city or the difficulties that young girls have in finding hous-
ing, employment, or “safe” amusements; they are about the “deficit” that
young girls pay because they are women, dependencies in the home and at
work, whose wages are considered “ ‘common property’” in the home (281;
Laughlin is quoting Cicely Hamilton). The daughter’s assumed dependence
in the home provides employers with an excuse for paying lower wages to the
young working-girl. But that assumption also ensures that the daughter must
either stay in the home or attempt to compete for affordable lodgings with
the male worker who earns more and supplement her income with various
forms of prostitution, which Laughlin lumps together under the rubric of
white slavery.
Laughlin concludes her essay on Mamie by reporting her attendance
at a commission’s hearing on “ . . . the connection, so repeatedly alleged,
between low wages and vice” (198). The hearing has come about because of
increasing reports of white slavery. Laughlin, however, invokes the rhetoric
60 Keeping Up Her Geography

of white slavery only to use it as a metaphor for the convergence of inequal-

ity that occurs in both the home and the workplace; she explicitly renames
“white slavery” as that manner in which the working-girl pays the “deficit”
represented by her own wages. White slavery, in this analysis, is not so much
a pernicious assault on the morality of young girls of the city, but another
site—like work and home—in which the working-girl is treated as “common
property.” White slavery is merely an extension of the forces of home and
work, a place to which the working-girl finds herself consigned—not unlike
the House of the Good Shepherd—because of the private and public spaces
that collude in her inequality. Laughlin uses the menace of white slavery to
argue for a women’s minimum wage; white slavery, in this analysis, is a site
produced through the collusion of public and private that keeps the work-
ing-girl unequal.
However, Laughlin’s concern for the economic conditions affecting
working-girl morality does not take her analysis further into the workplace.
Rather she uses the assumptions made about young women’s position in the
home to shift her analysis to the daughter who is not forced by economic
necessity to work outside the home. For it is the assumptions made about the
daughter’s position in the home that create her inequality in the workplace.
In other words, Laughlin shifts her analysis from one concerned mainly with
the economic inequality of women in the workplace, to how economic and
social inequality are gendered in the home across class, and, therefore, affect
all women. Her analysis suggests that if Van Vorst had looked more closely
into the conditions of the home, she might have better understood the attrac-
tions of the urban environment for those women who work for luxuries.
Thus, Laughlin begins to look toward the middle-class ideal of home
as the “cause” of the “effects”—the working-girl’s unequal position in the
urban environment—she has delineated. In order to do this, she shifts her
attention from the urban environment to the gender dynamics in the mid-
dle-class home. As in both Richardson’s and Van Vorst’s analysis, the middle-
class home is, in this section, troped as a separate world, existing prior to and
apart from the urban environment. Laughlin begins her story, like the down-
wardly mobile narrator of Richardson’s text, in the country. Once again, the
working-girl’s story has been transposed into the story of the middle-class
female subject’s removal from the rural environment and into the “fallen”
space of the city. “Forced Out” takes the reader out of the city, and into the
rural home of a prosperous but increasingly obsolete farming family. The title
seems to refer to the independent farm family “forced out” of their comfort-
able rural existence and their labor functions in the home and into the urban
environment. Instead, however, it is the daughter in this essay, and in the
Journeys into Urban Interiors 61

next, that Laughlin understands as being “forced out”: the family’s upward
mobility, represented by their move to the city, also represents the appropria-
tion of the daughter’s labor. She is forced into idleness and encouraged to see
the small amount of labor she performs in the home as trivial, expected but
not valued. The father and industrialism collude to appropriate female labor,
and, thus, to make her into a dependent: a dependency represented by her
isolation in a home that is no more than a lodging place for the family. It is
permissible for the daughter to work at home or to leave the home to marry,
but not to assume employment for the purposes of economic independence
or self-respect. The middle-class daughter struggles, like the working-girls
of Laughlin’s earlier essays, to establish employment and a home that will
incorporate them into the urban life that surrounds them. If they do not, she
argues, then woman “must become wholly dependent on her sexual function
alone” in an urban environment that represents the “decay” of the female
subject (285). This, of course, is what the middle-class woman and the work-
ing-girl of the Night Court have in common: both are dependent upon their
sexual function.
In her final essay, Laughlin retraces this story of cause and effect, of
the female subject’s appearance in the city as unequal, through the story
of one archetypal female subject. This essay, “The Woman of It,” is Sarah’s
story: “typifying and epitomizing woman’s upward struggle through the ages
of human history” (316). Sarah lives in an isolated mining town with her
father. His death forces her into marriage for economic and moral security.
When she becomes a mother and feels her husband wandering away from
the home, she decides she must adapt herself to her new condition for her
children’s sake. This means tying herself more thoroughly to her husband,
making her indispensable to his comforts. However, when they arrive in the
urban environment she finds that her labors have been appropriated; the
social, educational, and domestic services that she provides are now offered
through the economic, social, and educational structures of the city. The
structure of Laughlin’s text leads back from the “effect”: the exploitation of
the working-girl at home and at work and the appropriation of her labor.
Then, she analyzes the single-dependent woman of the urban environment
reduced to common property; and finally, she traces this effect back to its
cause in the home where she finds the middle-class mother, mistress of a
vacant domain: “There stood the housemother—undisputed director of
a home which was no more than a lodging-place to her mate and their
brood. . . . and who now feels herself mistress of an empire whose glory
has now departed?” (319–20). In this analysis, the mother’s success at
adaptation, ironically, ends in her own obsolescence. Man, in the form of
62 Keeping Up Her Geography

industrialization, has commercialized the labors of the home, leaving her

with no labor to perform that will make her necessary to the members of
her household, much less to the social and political environment of the city.
Sarah learns to adapt again, however, by involving her husband, and thus
herself, in the civic and political evolution of the urban environment. This
adaptation to her environment is just that, another attempt at survival on
the part of the female subject; but Laughlin believes that such adaptation
within the urban environment can lead to a transformation of the female
subject into a citizen and prevent the Lilys of the world from emerging into
urban space as wards of the court.
At the beginning of Laughlin’s text, the working-girl emerges into
public space as a criminal, while the middle-class wife’s similar emergence
remains marginalized as an untold private story of domestic “meanness.”
Throughout the text, however, Laughlin works to reveal the relation between
the public story of the working-girl as criminal and the private story of the
middle-class woman. By bringing the private story of domestic “meanness”
into public view, Laughlin dramatizes how the working-girl emerges into the
urban environment as an unequal subject, the “effect” of the private subordi-
nation of the mother within the middle-class household. For if the daughter
is the “effect,” then it is motherhood and Nature that Laughlin identifies as
the cause of the daughter’s appearance in the Female Night Court. In the
final essay, then, it is not the working-girl who emerges rewritten as a “new”
female subject, but the middle-class mother.
From Laughlin’s perspective, as Sarah’s story demonstrates, reproduction
is the originary cause of woman’s loss of control of the production of her own
environment. Industrialization is merely an extension of these conditions. This
analysis seems to be different from Van Vorst’s understanding of urbanization
as in opposition to reproduction. However, the underlying argument about the
relation of industrialization and reproduction in both women’s texts is similar
in its effects: industrialization makes motherhood an impossibility, even as it
reduces the female subject to her biological and economic functions.
Both authors plot similarly deevolutionary narratives of the female sub-
ject. In both texts, masculinity is an unchanging force that creates the environ-
ment that increasingly defines the female subject according to her biological
and economic functions. In Laughlin’s analysis, however, woman does not
vacate the home voluntarily, but, rather, because she must; whereas Van Vorst
sees the home as a destiny that will “lift” the female subject up and allow her
to fulfill her reproductive, moral, and aesthetic functions, Laughlin sees this a
site of confinement and obsolescence. But whereas Van Vorst imagines that the
displaced female subject can reassert her primacy through her relocation to the
Journeys into Urban Interiors 63

home, Laughlin, like Richardson, sees this as the female subject’s opportunity
to reemerge into the urban environment as a transformed subject.
If urbanization marginalizes the middle-class woman, and thus, makes
home a moral vacancy that produces the erring-girl, then the securing of
woman’s place in the urban world through the social settlement is the means
through which the erring female subject comes home once again and emerges
from the night court as a middle-class female subject transformed into a
social and political citizen. What emerges from each of these texts is a new
middle-class female subject. Placing the working-girl within the context of
urbanization not only reveals the gendered implications of urbanization for
the working-girl, but also reemplots those implications for the middle-class
woman. In this sense, the working-girl subject is imagined as a manifestation
of urban processes, because she is imagined as representing the downward tra-
jectory of the female subject as she is displaced from the domestic sphere. She
emerges into the public spaces of the urban environment as an “erring” subject
and criminal who threatens the regeneration of American society, and as a
“cultural type,” but each of these authors attempt to intervene in this “fall” of
the female subject into the urban environment. Only Laughlin, however, sees
a reanalysis of the female subject’s place in the home as crucial to reimagining
the female subject’s place within the city.
Laughlin’s analysis of the urban home differs from Van Vorst and Rich-
ardson’s incorporation of the domestic into their analysis of the conditions of
working-girl’s environment. Her notion that the home is responsible for the
working-girl’s problems does not necessarily contradict Van Vorst’s desire to see
the female subject reappropriate women’s labor back into the home. Instead, her
concern with the mother’s “captivity” in the home reinterprets Van Vorst’s fear
of the working-girl’s supposed desertion of the home as an anxiety about the
middle-class female woman’s isolation within an increasingly irrelevant realm.
Similarly, Laughlin’s text offers a new understanding of Richardson’s narrator’s
identification with the storybook heroine’s orphaning: the fantasy of being with-
out the home is safely performed in the storybook romance for the middle-class
reader. And although this remains a subtext of “Rose”’s story, it also may be read
as the pretext for the both the storybook’s plot and The Long Day.

II. URBAN DOMESTICITIES: THE GENDERED POLITICS OF

THE PARLOR

Oddly enough, Van Vorst’s abstract sentimentalizing of the home as a

defining space of female subjectivity causes the home—as an urban object
of reform—to hold only a marginal place in her text. It is the ideal of the
64 Keeping Up Her Geography

home as a site of “family togetherness” and feminine aesthetics that haunts

her story, but, because Van Vorst only recognizes this traditional ideal of
home, her concerns are predicated on its demise. However, both Laughlin
and Richardson are concerned with the urban transformation of the home
and the implications this transformation has for the female subject. Rich-
ardson’s and Laughlin’s descriptions of the working-girl’s experience in the
working-girls’ home and the lodging place represent an urban environment
in which she is treated as a “criminal” to be spied upon and isolated for her
own protection and as a dependent who is entitled to work but has no rights
in housing. Laughlin specifically represents the male subject as appropriating
female labor out of the home and into the city for industrialization and com-
mercialization; she argues that where labor goes so too does the social life of
the home, leaving the middle-class mother an isolated captive. And, contrary
to Van Vorst’s depiction, the cultural space of the home still defines both the
working-girl and her middle-class counterpart, even as urbanization trans-
formed both the traditional form of that home and the gendered configura-
tions of its interior spaces.
In this section, I want to shift my analysis from the ways in which mid-
dle-class reformers imagined urbanization’s gendered implications, to recontex-
tualize Richardson’s and Laughlin’s claims about the home within the broader
cultural framework of changes in forms of U.S. housing in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century. I focus particularly on the shift from the parlor,
representative room of Victorian U.S. culture, to the living room as the main
room of the middle-class home in the suburbs of the city. I argue that the par-
lor was not only a middle-class space, representative of middle-class women,
but a gendered space that was significant to women across boundaries of class,
and, perhaps, more important to working-girls living in the city. Women writ-
ers’ interest in securing parlors for urban working-girls and women indicates
the continued significance of this space for female subjects across class, but also
points to middle-class women’s dissatisfaction with suburban ideologies of the
family, and the living room which represented them.
Urbanization brought a series of changes in housing conditions that
are continuously represented as socially and culturally transformative of the
families of all classes.10 Among these transformations was the introduction
of the tenement and apartment building, homes for working women living
apart from the family, and suburbanization of the middle classes. As early
as the 1880s William D. Howells, in A Hazard of New Fortunes, represents
urban forms of housing, both the impoverished tenement and the comfort-
able apartment, as a destruction of home life. The middle-class protagonist
of Howell’s novel, Basil March, tells his wife,
Journeys into Urban Interiors 65

“Of course no child born and brought up in such a place [the tenement]
could have any conception of home. [But] Think of a baby in a [middle-
class] flat!. . . . the flat is the negation of motherhood. The flat means
society life. . . . I don’t object to the conveniences, but none of these
flats have a living-room. . . . they have no room where the family can
all come together and feel the sweetness of being a family. . . . Why,
those tenements are better and humaner than those flats! There the
whole family lives in the kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but
the flat abolishes the family consciousness.” (55)

the gendered implications of different forms of housing. However, the pas-

sage foregoes gender analysis to discuss how different forms of housing affect
the family. I argue that this move from a gendered analysis of the household
to a focus on “family consciousness” replicates transformations in turn-of-
the century U.S. housing: this concern for the “family” effectively worked to
mask continue gendered inequalities within U.S. homes.
This focus on the “family consciousness” is described by Margaret
Marsh, in “From Separation to Togetherness in the Suburbs,” as the new
domestic ideal of “togetherness”: “city life had eroded ‘family unity’ by
encouraging all family members to become too individualistic” (514). The
ideal of togetherness “reorganized domesticity to make it independent of the
notion of separate masculine and feminine spheres” and emphasized the sub-
urbs, as opposed to the city, as the ideal site of that domesticity (510). It
manifested itself in the plan of the housing interior as well. An open infor-
mal living room, represented as a place of family togetherness, replaced the
parlor as the most significant room in the house. Whereas the parlor was a
formal place for the reception and entertainment of guests, and tradition-
ally associated with the feminine sphere, the living room was designated as
a space of family activity that included guests as well. No longer were guests
sectioned off from the family’s space, and the living room’s close proxim-
ity to the kitchen made even the preparations of entertainment available to
visitors. The public and private spaces of the home were no longer clearly
demarcated.11 Marsh suggests that this ideal actually manifested itself not
only in the ideals of space and place, but in gender relations as well, argu-
ing that men and women in the suburbs enjoyed a newly shared social life
represented by their shared leisure pursuits and community involvement.
Similarly, Daphne Spain argues, in Gendered Spaces, that the living room that
dominated the suburban home represented and encouraged gender equal-
ity in the turn-of-the century home. Spain, summarizing the arguments of
Gwendolyn Wright, contends that “[s]patial and social relations mutually
66 Keeping Up Her Geography

reinforce one another, and if status differences are engendered within the
home, they are likely to be expressed outside it also” (Spain 111).
However, Elizabeth Wilson questions this idealization of the suburb
as site of familial “togetherness” and equality. She notes that in a 1909 Good
Housekeeping article, Gail Godwin was already lamenting the isolation of the
suburbs; “suburban life exiled women to ‘lonelyville’: ‘The busy men leave
on early trains, and at once plunged into the rush of their accustomed life
among their usual associates,’ she wrote, ‘but the young wife was left behind,
‘standing behind the struggling young vines of her broad new piazza’” (Wil-
son 107). While the suburbs might offer a spatial segregation that provided
class stabilization for middle-class women, it also hindered physical and cul-
tural mobility since these women were now even further removed the from
political, cultural, and economic sites of the city.
The reform texts of Laughlin and Richardson challenge Spain and
Marsh’s notions as well. While writing ostensibly about the working-girl
in the urban environment, they also express middle-class women’s desire to
emerge into an increasingly urbanized world as something other than moth-
ers. This desire to emerge into the city as a new kind of female subject is
a subplot of the reform narrative; the suburban home with its living room
is the isolating background to which she has been marginalized. Far from
advocating the kind of “togetherness” that Howell’s text seems to suggest is
represented in the living room house and the tenement kitchen, Laughlin
sees the home as a “vacant domain” where the middle-class mother is isolated
from urban activities and the tenement mother exists confined in toil and
poverty. The removal to the suburbs only accentuates the middle-class female
subject’s marginalization from the urban processes that increasingly define
U.S. culture and from the processes that define the lives of young working
women. Richardson emphasizes the difference between herself and her mar-
ried friend, Minnie Plympton, by removing her to the suburbs where she is
happy and successful, but no longer significant: her story is over while that of
the middle-class female author, as worker, continues.
A significant part of the female worker’s story is the urban parlor. Long
after the parlor disappeared from the suburbs, it continued to play a cultur-
ally significant role in urban housing, and that role was gendered. Richard-
son’s lengthy discussion of working-girl’s housing explicitly remarks on the
lack of parlors in working-girls’ housing:

The most important necessity of the model working woman’s hotel or

lodging-house would be, not a luxurious table, not a dainty sleeping-
room, but a parlor! The number of young girls who go wrong in a great
Journeys into Urban Interiors 67

city like this for want of the various necessities of a parlor must make
the angels of heaven weep. The houses where the poorly paid girl lives
have no accommodations for the entertainment of her male friends.
(Richardson 287)

Richardson writes that the working woman must either carry out her rela-
tionships “‘on the stoop,’” in the street, or in the privacy of her room, causing
public scandal no matter which option she chooses. Richardson’s exclama-
tory assertions indicate her anger at women’s spatial restriction in the city.
Her remarks emphasize the extent to which working women experience both
social confinement and surveillance within the city. Her comments also focus
on the relation between women’s sexuality and spatiality in a manner similar
to Laughlin’s analysis of the relation between women’s inequality in the home
and their treatment in the workplace. The parlor functions here as a space of
sociality that is nonthreatening because it acts as a buffer zone between the
surveillance and dangers of the street and the omnipresent family conscious-
ness or the sexuality of the hall bedroom. Thus, the urban parlor represents a
space capable of “saving” the working-girl from the twin plots that Laughlin
has attempted to write her out of—white slavery and motherhood.
In three different essays in Laughlin’s text the parlor emerges as a sig-
nificant site. In “The Effort to Save Girls” Laughlin tells her readers about
young Katie who lives in an overcrowded tenement with her family. Hav-
ing met a man at the store where she works, Katie is confronted with the
dilemma of where to take him: “Katie couldn’t ask him to her home. There
was no place there to entertain a fellow. The family had four rooms, and one
of them was nominally a parlor, but it had divers uses also and it was never
available for the exclusive use of one member of the family” (48). Neither
is Katie sure that her father will allow her to entertain men at home. Katie
finally ends up meeting her young man at a hotel in order to continue par-
ticipating in the amusements of the city that his superior wages allow her to
enjoy. Mamie in “Mamie’s Deficit” confronts the same problem; her mother
is sympathetic to Mamie’s desire to have the parlor as a space of entertain-
ment for her friends: “‘I used to have dreams of a sittin’-room, an all that
goes with it; but I’ve giv’em up, long ago’” (187). But the parlor must be
rented to a lodger, and the kitchen is given over to her father and his friends,
so that her father will not spend his earnings. Mamie takes her amusements
away from the home, and since she gives her family most of her earnings
becomes dependent on men to gain access to the commercial sites of the city.
She ends up pregnant and abandoned. When she disappears with a stranger
her mother and sister search fruitlessly for her. The lost dream of the parlor
68 Keeping Up Her Geography

as a “saving” place bonded mother and daughter, and the loss of the parlor
translates into the lost daughter for the tenement mother.
Similarly, Minnie and Hazel are refused the use of the parlor at their
lodging house, only to be thrown out of their room when Minnie entertains
her boyfriend there. Minnie tells her landlady that her rent should buy her
access to the use of the parlor, and, if not, she should at least be granted
the freedom to entertain in the room for which she pays rent. The landlady,
however, responds as both property owner and parent, “‘Not in my house!’”
(138). The surveillance of the home extends to the institution and the lodg-
ing house. But not only surveillance is at issue, here. Women’s wages do not
represent any rights of spatial use; she is treated as a dependent here as well,
asked to confine and isolate herself from sociality or to confine that sociality
to the street and commercial places of entertainment.
In effect Minnie’s rebellion against the landlady’s surveillance is also a
rebellion against the prerogatives of ownership. Minnie’s revolt reflects less
the individualistic desires of urban consumer culture than it does a defense
of her wages as entitling her to more than the confined space of her shared
room. Unable to attain this on her own she entertains her boyfriend in her
room, and confirming Richardson’s fears, she becomes “kept.” Minnie’s enter-
tainment of her boyfriend in her room is not read as a sign of sexual desire
or independence, but of economic failure. And each text that references the
parlor suggests that sexual desire cannot be represented in these stories—not
until the female subject emerges from the spatial and economic inequalities
of the colluding home and workplace. The removal to the lodging house, not
only doesn’t provide the working-girl with independence, it merely empha-
sizes the extent to which she is represented culturally as a dependent.
These texts suggest that the parlor operated as a space where women
could access a social life apart from the omnipresent “family consciousness.”
More importantly, it acts as an imaginary space for women’s expression of
their dissatisfaction with women’s confinement to the suburbs, the tenement
kitchen, the working-girls’ dormitory, the street, and the bondage of white
slavery. If women’s earnings are “common property,” then, so, too, are they
asked to share the spaces of others in a false relation of dependency. It is spe-
cifically a safe space of heterosexuality that fends off, as it were, the threats
of white slavery on the one hand and motherhood on the other. So, not only
does it act as a buffer zone, but also as a space of deferral securing the work-
ing-girl from public and private confinements that present themselves as the
only “way out” of her unequal position in the home and workplace.
The parlor is specifically coded as a female desire not only in reform
narratives, but in other contexts as well. In Edith Wharton’s The House of
Journeys into Urban Interiors 69

Mirth, published the same year as Richardson’s The Long Day, Lily Bart
longs for her own drawing room and the lack of that space represents her
economic defeat; her desire for a drawing room of her own may only be
attained through her acquiescence to a mercenary marriage with Sim Rose-
dale. And the parlor represents security for the “fallen” working-girl Nettie
Struthers. She tells Lily in their last meeting: “‘We’ve got a parlour too,’ she
explained with pardonable pride” (244). Lily prefers to stay, however, in the
working-class kitchen, experiencing here the family consciousness that she,
like Basil March, sees as lacking in the drawing rooms of the elite urban
houses she flits through. Her sentimentalizing of Nettie’s little nest ignores
the long hours of labor—at work and home—that Nettie performs to secure
the parlor. It is only, however, her marriage that makes it possible, throwing
an ironic light on Laughlin and Richardson’s representation of the parlor as
a space of deferment; only marriage and motherhood offer the working-girl
the opportunity to have a parlor. And this, as Laughlin argues, is a precarious
promise at best.
The parlor represents a significant site of gendered identity in other
texts as well, and well into the 1920s.12 The parlor’s cultural relevancy to
working-class women may attest to something more than an imposition of
middle-class women’s values upon the working woman, as Judith Fryer argues
in her reading of Anzia Yezierska’s short story, “The Lost ‘Beautifulness.’” In
this story the impoverished Jewish immigrant mother Henneh Hayyeh tries
“‘to shine up my kitchen like a parlor’” (35). Henneh does manage to paint
her kitchen like a parlor only to have the landlord raise the rent. Henneh’s
dream of a party for her employer and neighbors, of her son bringing his
friends home to entertain, is lost when the landlord evicts her. She is unable
to manage the hidden cost of attaining her parlor: the loss of what she has
earned because she does not own it. Henneh’s and Nettie’s desire to have a
space that represents sociality rather than labor, a parlor instead of a kitchen,
represents the female subject’s desire to be seen as something other than
domestic worker or an assumed part of the “family consciousness.” And if
Richardson and Laughlin desire to redefine the female subject as something
other than mother, these texts suggest that the authors also desire to redefine
the space she inhabits as a place to express a gendered sociality within the
confines of family and work. Neither the suburb nor its representative space,
the living room, offers that to the urban woman.
As I noted earlier, in her book Gendered Spaces, Daphne Spain argues
that the living room represents gendered equality. According to Spain, the
integration of female and male social space within the home reflects the
burgeoning equality of women in the early twentieth century. However, the
70 Keeping Up Her Geography

texts of that era seem to belie Spain’s assumption that spatial integration,
the knocking down of the wall between male and female domestic spaces, is
necessarily a sign of equality. Rather, these texts prove that gendered spatial
relations are more complex than the presence or absence of walls between
men and women. Placing the politics of the parlor within the context of
urbanization reveals the female subject’s struggle to make visible the social
and economic inequalities of home and work. And the placing of these poli-
tics within the context of urban reform narratives about the working-girl
provides a crucial means for understanding the various ways in which public
and private ideologies can be mutually constitutive.
If these middle-class reformers imagined themselves as mediating
between the social space of the middle-class home and the process of urban-
ization, then in the working-girl they found a figure to express their own
sense of marginality and inequality. Operating within the dominant ideol-
ogy of the public and private binary, employers, landlords, families, and men
were able to use this dichotomy to deny the working-girl not only her eco-
nomic equality, but also her social equality. Carving up the spaces of the
city to reflect their own vision of the relation between private and public,
these constituencies colluded to force the working-girl to be a different kind
of mediator between home and work, one reflecting the inequality of that
mutuality. Van Vorst, Richardson, and Laughlin offer varying responses to
this inequality, but each attempts to reconfigure the relation between the
public/private binary, according to her own reconstructive vision of women’s
social, economic, and political place. In the next chapter, Ellen Glasgow’s
attempt to use a masculine version of the public/private binary to meet
feminist ends points to the necessity of constructing a feminist vision of the
divide that does not reproduce the narrow focus of masculine ideologies of
the binary in its exclusion of race, class, and female embodiment.
Chapter Three
The Secret Properties of Southern
Regionalism

I. REGIONALISM’S FEMINIST AND NOT SO FEMINIST TURNS

The subject of regionalism has once again become a central preoccupation

of cultural criticism. What is noteworthy about this resurgence of the criti-
cal interest in regionalism is its feminist turn. In the late 1980s, feminist
theorists began to recover the importance of a regionalist framework to U.S.
women’s writing. Collections of literary and historical essays, such as Break-
ing Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997), The
Female Tradition in Southern Literature (1993), and Writing the Range: Race,
Class and Culture in the Women’s West (1991) began to appear in earnest in
the 1990s.1 In this chapter, I build on this work, but I am also interested
in a specific analysis of how southern regionalism, specifically agrarianism,
formulates the relation between private and public as gendered, how that
gendered relation informs the southern regionalist paradigm, and how the
writer Ellen Glasgow reveals in her work the marginalization of female labor
and reproduction that is constitutive of this paradigm.
Of course, the study of the South as a cultural region has had a long
institutional history in the U.S. But feminist literary critics working in the
field of southern culture have recently begun challenging traditional methods
of reading the southern renaissance of the interwar years. At the same time,
cultural critics have rediscovered the interdisciplinary and cross-regional
contexts of that renaissance. But it becomes exasperatingly clear that these
two critical gestures—the one an opening up of the “literary” to a broader
cultural context, and the second, a reconsideration of, as Anne Goodwyn
Jones terms it, “the work of gender” in a regionalist framework—don’t often
overlap. The work of women writers, and the importance of gender, to any
formulation of the cultural claims about regionalism is often suppressed,
excluded, or marginalized when critics approach the subject using the

71
72 Keeping Up Her Geography

interdisciplinary methodologies of modernist, U.S., or cultural studies.

Robert Dorman’s recent contribution to American studies is a good example.
In Revolt of the Provinces, Dorman considers the writing of southern regional
sociologists, writers, historians, and documentarians as part of the general
regionalist movement of the 20s and 30s. Dorman’s study is replete with
details on the ideological and aesthetic commitments of regionalism. But,
while Dorman discusses the western writing of Mary Austin, Willa Cather,
and Mari Sandoz, as well as the activities of Mabel Dodge Luhan and early
female historians, he does not discuss how early 20th-century feminism may
have influenced regionalist aesthetics or ideologies nor the role that gender
politics may have played in some of the underlying assumptions of the
movement and its outcome.
Another example of the marginalization of southern women writers
and the work of gender in studies of interwar southern regionalism can be
found in Richard King’s A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of
the American South, 1930–1955 (1980). Traditionally, the work of the fugi-
tive-agrarians—along with Faulkner’s writing—has dominated discussions of
the southern renaissance. However, King makes the significant point that the
renaissance was a movement that stretched across disciplines, and thus, he
includes in his study historians, sociologists, and journalists, as well as well-
known literary figures. King’s framework for understanding is what he calls
the “Southern family romance,” a rebellion against the generation of fathers
preceding the authors (thus the interest in the grandfather in many south-
ern novels); from this rebellion emerges a southern historical consciousness
“fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity” about the relation between past
and present (7). In defending his selection of texts, King states,

Black writers are not taken up because for them the Southern family
was hardly problematic. . . . Their great theme was the attempt (liter-
ally) to escape the white South which had historically oppressed their
people. The case with women writers is more difficult, but my read-
ing of them indicates that whatever the merits of their work . . . they
were not concerned primarily with the larger cultural, racial, and politi-
cal themes that I take as my focus. For whatever reasons—and the one
woman I do treat, Lillian Smith, urged women to address themselves to
these larger themes—they did not place the region at the center of their
imaginative visions. (9)

King’s argument merely reproduces the elisions made by the white, male
southern writers themselves by insisting on this paradox: the southern family
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 73

romance could not possibly have any interest for black southern authors
concerned with (public) racial oppression; but southern (white) women
authors are not included precisely because of the private concerns of their
writing. The paradox that informs King’s claim about southern regionalist
writing is exactly where feminist literary criticism must enter the regionalist
debate.2 Rather than taking the position that the “private” emphasis of
southern women’s writing is a gendered representation of regionalism, I
approach the problem of the regional as a framework for discussing gender
ideology.
King’s study suggests that regionalism exists in a liminal negotiation
between the private and the public. This allows critics to make the simulta-
neous claims that white women’s writing is too personal and black writers’
concerns are too public. A number of feminist critics point to, and argue
against, the kind of limited perspective that King brings to his study.3 The
purpose of my own work is to recontextualize the work of one of the authors
that King does not include in his list of authors excluded from his study:
Ellen Glasgow. I discuss how Glasgow theorizes regionalism from a gendered
perspective, not merely how her concerns can be revealed as public or how
she engages southern politics through the representation of the private, but
how her texts bring forth the race and gender implications of regionalism’s
negotiation between the private and public. Marjorie Pryse argues that one
of the reasons women’s “local color” fiction has had a subordinate position
in the U.S. literary canon is because these writers did not theorize their writ-
ing in the way that writers of realism did. Glasgow was not so silent about
her relation to the South or the meaning of her fictional work, but still she
has been marginalized in studies of the renaissance. Although much of her
private correspondence and nonfiction writing suggests that she was always
engaged in central debates about regionalism occurring in the major institu-
tional centers of the South, critics have been slow to situate the Glasgow in
relation to the regionalist paradigms of the interwar years.
One recent essay does situate the work of Glasgow in relation to this
paradigm. However, by leaving the gender and racial politics of regional-
ism behind, the writer seems to assume the basic compatibility of Glasgow’s
writing with the tenets of the fugitive-agrarians. Ellen Caldwell argues that
Glasgow’s 1930s correspondence with Allen Tate and her later novels are evi-
dence of the writer’s move toward the principles of agrarianism. In “Ellen
Glasgow and the Southern Agrarians,” Caldwell argues that Glasgow’s later
novels are about characters “struggling to recover a regional identity” (207).
The content of this regional identity is only vaguely defined as an anti-
industrial “celebration of Southern values and tradition” that recognizes “the
74 Keeping Up Her Geography

‘presentness’ of the past” and the importance of a “common heritage” that

exudes a stoical identification with the land. Caldwell relies rather heavily
on Glasgow’s 1930s correspondence with Allen Tate to explain Glasgow’s
agrarian transformation. But as Ritchie Watson indicates, the correspon-
dence between the two is “vague and diffuse” and focuses more upon their
professional support of each other than any aesthetic or political discussion
of southern culture (Watson 39). Caldwell does not examine the writings
of the agrarians or note that the regional identity figured in their writings is
implicitly masculine. In this chapter, I reexamine Caldwell’s claims by ana-
lyzing where and how gender and regionalism intersect in the writings of the
agrarians and in Glasgow’s novels Barren Ground and Vein of Iron. Even crit-
ics sensitive to the “work of gender” in the Southern regionalist movement
of the interwar years tend to simplify her female characters’ relation to the
land and their commitment to a regional identity. I argue, on the contrary,
that Glasgow’s texts evidence the author’s struggle—not to recover an ungen-
dered regional identity—but to recover from the margins the female labor
that makes a regionalist aesthetic possible.
While I am sympathetic to the desire to reclaim Glasgow as a member
of the primary movement of southern regionalism in the interwar years, a
more complete understanding of what regionalist culture signified for the
agrarians, and the particular problems that Glasgow encountered working
in a regionalist framework, is needed. What can the recovery of a regional
identity possibly mean for Glasgow? In the following chapter, I begin with
a reading of the agrarian construction of the regional, and then I examine
the late writings of Glasgow within this context. I argue that the regionalist
framework depends upon the suppression of the female body, its productive
and reproductive labor, as its determining aesthetic. The negotiation between
the public and private that informs the regionalist aesthetic effects this sup-
pression through its investment in property as the defining form through
which the private becomes public.

II. “‘RARIN’ AROUND WITH THE BOYS’”: REGIONAL CULTURE

AND THE WORK OF GENDER IN GLASGOW’S LATER NOVELS

The agrarians produced one major work, I’ll Take My Stand (1930), an inter-
disciplinary collection of essays to which twelve writers from various disci-
plines contributed. My reading of the southern tenets of interwar regionalism
will focus on this collection. The essays of I’ll Take My Stand do not neces-
sarily constitute a unified vision, but there are patterns of representation that
persist through many of those essays—and it is possible to discern within
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 75

them a particular ideology of gender relations and culture. Many contempo-

rary southern scholars are still drawn to the agrarian manifesto, because of its
cogent and timely polemic against capitalist versions of progress; the agrar-
ians point to the displacements and alienations engendered by imperialist,
industrial, and urban impositions upon a primarily agricultural people. But
although the agrarians’ critique of modernity often echoes Marxist analyses,
the essays ultimately provide a very different perspective on culture.
The major figures which form the locus of southern regionalism are the
yeoman farmer, the aristocratic planter, and the regional artist. These three
figures reoccur again and again as social agents of a common agrarian cul-
ture. What unites these three figures (ideally) is a commitment to the cyclical
routines of cultivation as against the time-oriented culture of industrialism.
For example, Andrew Nelson Lytle asserts in “The Hind Tit”:

This will be the most difficult task industrialism has undertaken, and
on this rock its effort to urbanize the farm will probably split—to con-
vince the farmer that it is time, not space, which has value. It will be
difficult because the farmer knows that he cannot control time, whereas
he can wrestle with space, or at least with that particular part which is
his orbit. (212)

This notion that the farmer’s difference depends on his adherence to the value
of, and his exemption from, any time but that of the cyclical movements of
nature dovetails nicely with Allen Tate’s theoretical definition of regionalism.
According to Tate, regionalism “is that consciousness or that habit of men
in a given locality which influences them to certain patterns of thought and
conduct handed to them by their ancestors. Regionalism is thus limited in
space but not in time” (539).4 The artist and the farmer both value space
over time, since it is through space that the cyclical movements of nature, the
only time that concerns the farmer, manifest themselves as inheritable prop-
erties. The regionalist aesthetic unites farmer and artist; both remain within
their own orbits, concerning themselves with the inherited “properties” that
define the material and aesthetic limits within which they “wrestle;” property
as form provides the shaping mechanism that makes it possible to reproduce
culture. And property is the medium through which the regionalist figure
expresses his character:

The kind of property that sustains the traditional society is not only not
hostile to a unified moral code; it is positively the basis of it. Moreover,
it is the medium, just as canvas is the medium of the painter, through
76 Keeping Up Her Geography

which that code is passed to the next generation. For traditional prop-
erty in land was the primary medium through which man expressed his
moral nature; and our task is to restore it or get its equivalent today.
(Tate 556–57)

This canvas functions also as a mirror, however, because it gives man a pro-
found image of himself as reflected in the generation preceding him. But the
South has never managed to express this ideal social organism, because of
slavery, then tenancy, and most recently, the encroachment of industrialism.
Taking the hierarchical religious unity of feudalism as his model, Tate is not
concerned with the exploitative, oppressive nature of slavery, but rather with
the black man’s alien presence on the soil as a “barrier” to southern white
culture’s vision of itself. Tate claims that the purely economic status of these
workers cannot provide the planter with an image of himself; instead the
black agricultural worker in slavery (and today) acts as a barrier between the
regionalist figure and the soil. Both Tate and Ransom object to the urban
worker as a similar barrier to cultural production. Reduced to a purely eco-
nomic function, the black worker in the South and the urban worker in the
North are “anonymous” and “alien,” receiving no image from and giving no
image back to the propertied.
Given the centrality of cultivation of the land to regionalist thinking, it
is surprising that the authors place more emphasis upon leisure as a unifying
category of white masculinity than they place upon work. The regionalist
figure, wrestling only with that space which is his, saves himself from the
time-laden culture of industrialism, and gives up the “uncertain” physical
pleasures offered by capitalism for the certain mental satisfaction of life on
the land. The limitations put on physical work by nature allow the farmer-
planter-artist to participate in a robust masculine culture of conversation,
hunting and fishing, or, as Lytle puts it, a general “rarin’ around with [the]
boys” (213). Leisure springs naturally from a man’s relation to the soil and
unites white masculinity across class and time: like land as property ensuring
a homogeneous tradition throughout time, land as a space of leisure ensures
the reproduction of southern culture when its forms are passed from father to
son. This ideology of culture, however, excludes the possibility of the prop-
ertyless acting as agents of culture, of regional identity; they can only act as
mirrors of, or barriers to (like the urban worker, the southern tenant, or the
slave of the Old South) the landowners’ cultural relation to the soil.
Whereas this masculine mirroring of white identity assumes a cross-
class vested interest among the yeoman, planter, and artist for the promotion
of a regional culture, in its focus on the farmer’s “wrestling with space” the
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 77

regionalist aesthetic subsumes all female members under the rubric of the
household economy. If men are defined by their relation to the land and
united in their leisure (the same social culture operating at different levels
of society), the female subject of southern regionalism is relegated to the
margins of I’ll Take My Stand, appearing here and there as an agent of the
consumerism and sexuality associated with northern urbanism. Within the
household economy she functions as a part of the structure of agrarianism,
but once she steps outside the boundaries of that economy, she, like the ten-
ant or the slave, becomes a barrier to the reproduction of southern identity.
Gender and sexuality come only obliquely into play in the agrarians’
representation of southern culture. Sexuality is generally subsumed under
fears about the consumerism that comes with an industrial economy and the
decline of the family. In the book’s most extended discussion of gender, Lytle
describes the process of dairying—central, of course, to Glasgow’s Barren
Ground—that forms the bulk of women’s work, and laments the introduc-
tion of labor-saving machinery into the farm woman’s household. While rec-
ognizing the labor involved in maintaining a farm household, he nevertheless
regrets the introduction of a farm generator to the household: “The farmer’s
wife now becomes a drudge. As the mainstay of the structure she was con-
tent to bear the greatest burden, but now she grows restive. She has changed
from a creator in a fixed culture to an assistant to machines” (237). This
restiveness manifests itself in the desire for leisures offered in the market-
place—going to town, the movies, wanting a car, and listening to the radio.
Or, conversely, offering herself in the marketplace to pay for these pleasures.5
And this restiveness threatens a regional identity rooted in the passing down
from father to son of material and cultural forms of inheritance that depend
upon limited and fixed relations of gender in order to secure its leisure and
its property.
Since the female subject rarely makes a central appearance in I’ll Take
My Stand, I want to focus on a later passage in Lytle’s essay, a passage in
which women do appear, and that I see as an extended metaphor for how
gender functions in the agrarian model of culture. Lytle describes in detail a
traditional game played in the South called “Hog Drovers.” One young man
plays the father-farmer and sits with his “daughter” upon his lap; another
fellow plays the nomadic hog drover and comes looking for lodging and
permission to court the farmer’s daughter. The father struggles between his
desire for the potential lodger’s money and his desire to save his “daughter’s
virtue.” Finally, he relents, but only on the condition that the hog drover will
“put another one” in her place (231). This the hog drover proceeds to do by
selecting a woman from the sidelines to sit on the father’s lap, and this goes
78 Keeping Up Her Geography

on until all of the game’s participants are paired. The game may be simply
read as men performing an exchange of women common in patriarchal cul-
tures. But what I find significant about the game is the father’s insistence that
the hog drover produce another daughter to replace the one he takes; there
is no mother in this game, not at the level of exchange of the daughter, nor
apparently at the level of the daughter’s reproduction. Not only is the daugh-
ter replaceable, she is also—like the culture in which the game is played—a
product of male-to-male cultural reproduction. This traditional regional
game mimics the aesthetics of regional culture itself: where men effectively
produce their relation to one another through inherited forms of property
and tradition, thus repressing women’s productive and reproductive role in
that culture. It is within this framework that regionalist female writers, such
as Glasgow, may productively be reread, for if, as contemporary critics claim,
she was invested in recovering a regional identity, the gendered nature of that
identity must be reconstructed from the margins of the agrarian paradigm.
The struggle that defines Ellen Glasgow’s later work is not so much a
struggle to recover a regional identity for her female characters, but to bring
from the margins of regionalist space the female subject whose productive
and reproductive labor make the regionalist aesthetic possible. Two passages
from Glasgow’s A Certain Measure illustrate how far—at least in theory—her
vision of southern culture differs from the agrarian perspective. In the pref-
ace to The Miller of Old Church, Glasgow writes of the pre-Civil War South:

Soil, scenery, all the colour and animation of the external world, tempted
a convivial race to an endless festival of the seasons. . . . Life, for the
ruling class at least, was genial, urbane, and amusing. . . . Even slav-
ery, a depressing spectacle at best, was a slight impediment to the faith
that had been trained to enjoy the fruits of rather than to examine the
character of peculiar institutions. (134)

This vision of the pre-Civil War culture veers from the assertion that envi-
ronment encourages a culture of leisure to the revelation of the labor, “the
depressing spectacle,” upon which this culture rests. In another passage from
A Certain Measure, Glasgow uses conventional agrarian images of cultivation
to reverse and reinterpret its conception of white women’s cultural produc-
tion: “Women have been too much occupied with the serious business of
life, with planning, contriving, scheming to outwit an adverse fortune, and
tilling the fertile soil of man’s vanity, to bother about so primitive a science
as mythology” (225). Leisure cannot be connected to common cross-gender
vested interest; rather it is a part of that agrarian (and masculine) “mythology”
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 79

that marginalizes female labor. Instead, for Glasgow, the prime product of
southern cultivation is white masculinity. Nor does Glasgow’s metaphor tend
toward an understanding of working the soil as a means toward the creation
of a leisured folk culture. Both passages enact reversals in the agrarian code of
cultivation by placing the labors of caste/class and gender at the center of her
regional vision.
However, the use of landscape imagery in these passages differs from
the perspective articulated in the opening pages of Barren Ground, where,
in her description of Pedlar’s Mill, the narrator maps the country from
an avowedly agrarian perspective. The narrator depicts the environment
as an agent in the poverty of its inhabitants, the general character of fail-
ure that permeates the air, but, also, as a victim of the Civil War and the
“swarming” tenants who occupy the land in its aftermath. Its inhabitants
are defined by their relation to the land as the narrative voice moves delib-
erately from the use of a naturalistic imagery to describe the landscape and
those who work upon the land to an ironic exposition of the specific “good
people” whose farms remain intact: “The tenant farmers, who had flocked
after the ruin of war as buzzards after a carcass, had immediately picked the
featureless landscape as clean as a skeleton. When the swarm was over only
three larger farms remained undivided in the hands of their original own-
ers” (4–5). Here, the narrator describes the nameless tenants in both grimly
pastoral and animalistic imagery. In a later passage, the narrator uses a more
organic metaphor to describe the propertyless tenants as a “shallow wash
of broomsedge” who threaten the “native pines” (the Scotch-Irish farmers)
that rise naturally in the soil. They represent the undifferentiated, frag-
mented landscape that threatens to engulf the few cultivated fields of those
farmers that have managed to retain their land. In each instance the tenants
are imaged as parasites upon the land, waiting to engulf the remains of the
lands’ rightful inhabitants. As in the regionalists’ imaging of culture, those
who cannot claim ownership to the land appear as aliens who threaten its
natural proprietors.
Continuing the recognizable agrarian narrative, the narrator glides from
this generalized sweep of the landscape and its inhabitants into a particularized
narrative that focuses on the history of those “stalwart” farmers who have
preserved their farms. Finally, she singles out the heroic story of John Calvin
Abernathy, founder of Old Farm, a religious and economic patriarch whose
female relations—his wife and daughter-in-law—are completely eclipsed in
the narrator’s family history in favor of a short narrative history of how this
“good family”’s fortunes have been mixed with those of the “poor white.”
The narrator’s framing of the family in terms of its paternal lineage and the
80 Keeping Up Her Geography

patriarch’s shaping of the land, and her increasingly narrow and individualized
focus, sets up a conventional agrarian expectation that the end product of
this individualized representation will be the yeoman/artist son. Instead the
narrator’s gaze, and thus the reader’s, comes to rest on Dorinda Oakley, and
to access the landscape through her eyes. Bringing the female subject from
the margins of agrarianism, the narrator signals her intention to represent
the landscape of regionalism from its female inhabitant’s perspective.
Accordingly, it is Dorinda’s experience of the land that critics have
focused on as the chief source of agrarian feeling in the novel. Initially, how-
ever, it is Dorinda’s desire to escape Pedlar’s Mill that defines her relation
to the land. She is represented as being held captive within the landscape,
as both isolated and menaced by the “relentless tyranny of the soil” (48).
Seen through her eyes the land is “neglected, monotonous, abandoned to
solitude” (12). She dreams of meeting a stranger from the train and disap-
pearing with him “into the something different beyond the misty edge of the
horizon” (12). Only after she meets Jason Greylock does Dorinda experience
the landscape as responding to her desires for “something different,” rather
than as threatening to engulf her in sameness. Jason’s appearance is like an
“April flush” passing over “the waste places” of the deadened, barren fields of
Pedlar’s Mill in winter (13). The broomsedge that previously threatened to
engulf her in isolation is suddenly “shot through with romance” (58). This
presentation of the female subject’s relation to the land is subjective, roman-
tic, and rooted in the cycles of cultivation. Her sexual awakening comes with
the plantings of spring. Her expected marriage to Jason is to occur in the fall,
during the harvest time. This symbolic relating of the stages of romance to
the cycles of cultivation naturalizes the labor of agriculture. The romantic
plot and the agrarian plot find their image in one another: the land acts
as canvas and mirror for Dorinda’s newly awakened sexuality, providing her
with a sense of agency. But the work of gender that this experience of the
landscape conceals is revealed in Dorinda’s locating of her agency, not within
a shaping of the land itself, but within the private realm of domesticity and
reproduction.
Before she imagined “something different” as existing outside the
boundaries of Pedlar’s Mill. However, because of her relationship with Jason,
she now experiences the landscape itself as a possible site for transforma-
tion and imagines herself as enabled to make a difference within her sur-
roundings. When she takes a shortcut across Five Oaks’ property and sees
the domestic disorder and decay of the yard and house where Jason lives
with his father, she thinks, “‘When I get the chance, it won’t take me long
to make things look different’” (145). Not only does the coming of spring
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 81

to Pedlar’s Mill mirror her own awakening, then, but Dorinda translates this
awakening into a gendered ordering of that space given over to the female
subject. However, the disruption of Dorinda’s relationship with Jason reveals
to the reader how interdependent the romance and the agrarian plots are.
Dorinda’s desire to marry outside her class represents a trespassing against the
agrarian economics that sustain her romantic experience of the land. When
Dorinda cuts across the Greylock property this physical trespass represents
her social trespass against the designs of the male propertyholders of Pedlar’s
Mill. At Five Oaks, she learns from Dr. Greylock, Jason’s father, that Jason
has married the prosperous Geneva Ellgood, and that her own pregnancy is,
therefore, illegitimate, and her domestic and sexual agency delegitimized as a
trespass upon the social order.
Thus, the male discussions about farming that Dorinda has previously
ignored as “impersonal” (75) and commonplace are revealed to be personal,
to be implicated in Dorinda’s ability to realize even a gendered agency within
the domestic space of Five Oaks. Behind Dorinda’s romantic plotting of the
landscape is a constant dialogue about farming and the general poverty of
Pedlar’s Mill. Both Nathan and Jason emerge as regionalist tutors in this early
section of the novel, missionaries to the land who believe that the tenant sys-
tem is to blame for the poor crops: “‘No man will work himself to death over
somebody else’s land’” (31), Jason tells Dorinda. This perspective is echoed
by Dorinda’s father. But Matthew Fairlamb tells Dorinda that if Jason wants
to farm Five Oaks and make it a success, “‘ . . . he’ll need either a pile of
money or a hard workin’ wife’” (16). This impersonal discussion suggests the
substitutability and exchangeability of the “wife” as an economic factor in the
agrarian household economy. But Dorinda only comes to understand this
when she hears of Jason’s marriage to Geneva Ellgood, a “pile of money.” Her
relation to the land, her experience of being mirrored in its forms, depends
upon her ability to access that landscape through the male subject, Jason; it
depends on her ability to access the “impersonal” structure of the land as a
form of cultural and economic inheritance that reproduces masculinity. And
Jason—however reluctantly—represents that structure.
Jason’s marriage disrupts Dorinda’s relation to the rhythmic cycles of
the land. Dorinda’s first reaction to Dr. Greylock’s news of the marriage is an
experience of being drowned within the stagnant air of the house (152). She
believes that in escaping the house she will be able to reconstruct her place
within the landscape. But as she waits in the woods for Jason and Geneva
to return she experiences both the land around her and her inner self as a
“vacancy.” This sense of the loss of self is reiterated as an immolation of sub-
jectivity. Dorinda feels as if she is “drowning in vacancy” and that “she [is]
82 Keeping Up Her Geography

outside time and space” (159) and plunged into an “abyss” of “nothingness”
(159). This disintegration of the paralleling of the romantic and agrarian
plotting of the landscape is imaged in the interior space of the self and the
exterior space of the environment as the barrenness of the broomsedge: “The
area of feeling within her soul was parched and blackened, like an abandoned
field after the broomsedge is destroyed” (173). The female subject’s emo-
tional relation to the land is imaged once again through the metaphor of
the broomsedge, but this is not the broomsedge as a symbol of Dorinda’s
awakening inner life, but the broomsedge associated with the tenants of the
narrator’s opening. The broomsedge as a symbol of female sexuality has been
eradicated and along with it Dorinda’s feeling of being “rooted” within the
landscape. The agrarian relation to the land as a mirror that produces com-
mon culture produces only a vacating of Dorinda’s subjectivity. She discov-
ers herself, like the tenants, outside the boundaries of that economy, since
a culture based on property requires legitimate reproduction to insure the
integrity of property as a form of cultural and economic inheritance.
The female subject’s illegitimate reproduction threatens the integrity of
property, since the illegitimate child is already dispossessed of that form of
inheritance upon which the culture depends. Dorinda’s illegitimate pregnancy
and illicit sexuality might connect her to the similarly situated Idabella, the
mulatto mistress of Dr. Greylock and mother to his nameless mulatto offspring
who also live at Five Oaks. But the small domestic conceit that she can make
a difference at Five Oaks has been based on Dorinda’s perception of her differ-
ence from Idabella. During her relationship with Jason she imagines Idabella
and her children as barriers to her future with Jason: “Would Jason be able to
rid the house of this half-breed swarm and their mother, a handsome, slatternly
yellow woman, with a figure that had grown heavy and shapeless, and a smoul-
dering resentful gaze?” (63). The uncleanness attached to Five Oaks is mirrored
in the illegitimate relations that Dr. Greylock has with the “slatternly” Ida-
bella and the “half-breed swarm” who are a product of their union. So, when
Dorinda imagines cleaning up Five Oaks, she implicitly imagines getting rid
of Idabella and her children, ejecting them from their home. Dorinda cannot
imagine that Idabella may not be “slatternly,” but merely “resentful” that she
and her children have no claim to Dr. Greylock’s farm; Idabella does not apply
herself to the domestic ordering of Five Oaks, because she, and her children,
are imaged, like the tenants the narrator describes in the opening section of the
novel, as a “swarm” who threaten, theoretically, the “native”’s relation to the
soil. As the narrator states of the tenants in the opening section of the text: they
are an “anonymous brood,” receiving no reflection from the land and leaving
none for the future.
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 83

The description of Idabella’s children as a “half-breed swarm” trans-

forms the metaphor of tenancy into a racial one. As Susan Lurie indicates,
the racial implications of this metaphorical connection supersede any gen-
dered identification between Dorinda and Idabella.6 And it is the collapse of
this metaphorical bridge between the two women that represents Dorinda’s
submergence of a female perspective in favor of the masculine regionalist
plot. This connection between Idabella and Dorinda, based on their simi-
larly illegitimate relations with the Greylocks, remains repressed within the
text, and this repression signals Dorinda’s transformation into a property
holder complicit with the regionalist aesthetic that makes property the defin-
ing space of the relation between public and private. However, this is not the
only gendered connection in the text that is repressed when located within
the regional aesthetic of the land as property.
Dorinda’s inability to recognize that she and Idabella are similarly situ-
ated, because of their relation of dependency in the structure of cultural and
economic inheritance, is related to her racialization of those emotions that
threaten her “individual will” to agency. In two instances, Dorinda feels her
emotions overwhelming her and describes these “unconscious” impulses as a
“buried jungle,” “a stirring of primitive impulses,” where “thoughts had never
penetrated” (152, 239). Similarly, when Dorinda loses Jason and decides to
leave Pedlar’s Mill, she ponders the estrangement between herself and her
mother, Eudora, in explicitly racial terms: “For twenty years they had not
spent a night apart, and all the time her mother had dreamed of coral strands
and palm trees, while she herself had grown into a thing as strange and far
away as Africa” (185). This image recalls Eudora’s plans as a young woman to
marry a missionary and save souls in the Congo; when the missionary dies,
Eudora remains trapped in Pedlar’s Mill and becomes obsessed with over-
coming the dissipation of dirt and poverty that threatens her. Her admission
to her daughter that she still dreams of Africa, and of “black babies thrown to
crocodiles,” emerges in Dorinda as the racialization of her own “lost” female
self (174).
This passage represents two forms of self-imaging for Dorinda. On the
one hand, in comparing herself to Africa, Dorinda racializes her sexuality
and names herself as “foreign” both to her mother and to the land that has
defined Eudora’s waking life. So, in comparing herself to “Africa,” Dorinda
imagines herself as the site of her mother’s unrealized desires, an imagined
place where Eudora thought she could make a “difference;” but by identi-
fying herself with this place of unrealized desires, Dorinda also becomes a
“thing” alien to her mother, outside the agrarian plot which limits Eudora’s
ability to nurture her children. In other words, Dorinda, herself, is out of
84 Keeping Up Her Geography

her mother’s reach, alienated from the land, and as lost to her mother as
the lost babies of the Congo. Dorinda’s illicit love affair and her illegitimate
pregnancy are experienced, not merely as an estrangement from the land,
but from her mother as well, and the image of defeated motherhood that
Eudora represents. And when Dorinda uses the image of Africa to represent
her illicit sexuality, she acquiesces to the politics of a southern regional cul-
tural form that accepts the dispossession of “black babies” as part of its struc-
tural inheritance.7 When she identifies herself as “foreign” to the land, and to
her mother, she acquiesces to the agrarian perspective that defines the black
worker, the tenant farmer, and, implicitly, the woman who reproduces out-
side the boundaries of inheritance, as “alien” barriers to the propertyholder’s
relation to the soil, barriers to the reproduction of “native” culture.
But the passage also unearths Eudora’s frustrated desire to break through
the agrarian narrative and reveal its suppression of the gendered economy of
unfulfilling reproduction and labor that has defined her life. If throughout
the text, Jason has imagined himself as an agrarian “missionary” to the farm-
ers at Pedlar’s Mill, then Eudora can only imagine work as a spiritual mission-
ary among “foreign fields” as the way to “escape from . . . endless captivity”
(105). Significantly, Eudora imagines a landscape aesthetic much like the agrar-
ian one: a beautiful setting (blue skies, golden sands) that conceals the horrors
of infanticide, specifically the throwing away of black babies, babies that Eudora
cannot save. And these nightmares of the Congo begin with the births of her
younger children, “while she was looking ahead . . . to a peaceful middle age
unhampered by childbearing” (39). Eudora’s inability to overcome the agrarian
plot that has entrapped her bursts forth in the image of wasted life that haunts
her dreams. This “maternal helplessness” (Matthews 163) is displaced onto the
babies of the Congo and represents Eudora’s inability to prevent her family from
sliding into the same decay and uncleanliness found at Five Oaks. Although
she works compulsively, “there [is] nothing to show for her struggle” (39). If
Dorinda rejects her sexuality through its racialization, then, she also rejects
motherhood itself as an untenable position within agrarianism. Strangely, this is
what Eudora and Idabella have in common: both are symbols of inefficacy.8
This recognition of the untenability of motherhood is foreshadowed,
early in the novel, when the narrator interrupts the flow of Dorinda’s conversa-
tion with the dying Rose Emily, and Dorinda’s daydreams about Jason, to focus
on “born mother” Minnie May and the other Pedlar children playing dolls on
the rug:

They had made a doll’s house out of a cracker box, with the frayed cor-
ners of the rug for a garden. “Now Mrs. Brown has lost her little girl,
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 85

and she is going to Mrs. Smith’s to look for her. . . . And Mrs. Brown
found that her little girl had been run over in the road and killed in the
middle of the road . . . So she decided that all she could do for her
was to have a handsome funeral and spend the ten dollars she’s saved
from her chicken money.” (23)

The straying of Mrs. Brown’s little girl evokes Dorinda’s own straying
through the property of Five Oaks, her desire to step outside the bound-
aries that enclose her life. This allusion to the daughter in the middle of
the road also presages Dorinda’s emotional death by the side of the road
where she learns of Jason’s marriage, and her miscarriage in New York when
she steps off a curb and is hit by a car. Told within the context of invalid
Rose Emily’s abdication, because of her illness, of her maternal and domes-
tic responsibilities to her small daughter, the passage references once again
maternal helplessness; the mother is unable to save her daughter, all she can
do is bury her—with the meager resources allotted to the female subject:
the excess products of reproduction that represent female inheritance within
the agrarian household.
Dorinda, however, steps outside this female economy—not, as the
agrarians would have it, to break away from the agrarian narrative but to
attempt to secure her place within it—in her desire to please Jason. Early in
the text, when Dorinda decides to spend the money she has saved from her
work in Nathan’s store on a blue dress, instead of a dairy cow for the family
farm, she disrupts this gendered economy. The dress, of course, represents
Dorinda’s desire to please Jason, and her rejection of her role in a family
economy that requires both the wages of her labor and the suppression of
her desires. But Dorinda’s guilt about the cow is directed toward her mother
who goes without butter so that her son Rufus may consume all that he
wants.9 It is expected that Dorinda will sacrifice for the family, turning her
wages over to her mother so that Eudora can provide nurture for the fam-
ily, without sacrificing her own health. Eudora’s willingness to do without
the butter is a form of maternal nurturance that makes possible the pro-
duction of masculinity and its reproduction of the landscape of regionalism.
Dorinda’s failed attempt to locate a space of agency for herself within the
gendered economy of regionalism requires not that she betray the family, but
the female economy that exists within, and helps sustain, the agrarian econ-
omy. When she exchanges the cow for the dress, she attempts to escape from
the maternal sacrifices Eudora makes only to further enclose Eudora within
that narrative, since the mother is the one who suffers from this exchange.
The fact that the male subjects of Barren Ground, who profit from Eudora’s
86 Keeping Up Her Geography

sacrifice, fail in their ability to sustain the economic structure that makes
possible the regional aesthetic matters only to the extent that it creates a void
through which Dorinda, the female subject, is later enabled to inherit the
family farm.10 Dorinda’s exclusion from the masculine propertied structure
of inheritance makes her similar to Idabella.
However, it is the original trespass against the mother—the exchange of
a gendered identification with the female labor that supports the land for an
identification with the male propertyholders who benefit from that labor—
that informs Dorinda’s decision to return to Old Farm and start the dairy.
The exchange of the cow for the dress is reversed in this decision as Dorinda
externalizes Eudora’s sexual and reproductive entrapment in the agrarian nar-
rative into the “impersonal” structure of production that gives her the agency
to return the land to its previous profundity.
This exchange of the cow for the dress, which Dorinda experiences as a
trespass against her mother, forms a subtext through which the gendered plot
of Barren Ground emerges. When Dorinda escapes to New York and experi-
ences a miscarriage, this trading of the cow for the dress reemerges in her
memory as wrong done to her mother:

What surprised her, when she was not too tired to think of it, was that
the ever-present sense of sin . . . was entirely absent from her reflec-
tions. She was very sorry about the blue dress; she felt remorse because
of the cow her mother might have had; but everything else that had
happened was embraced in the elastic doctrine of predestination. (202)

Later, while packing to move to the Faradays,’ she repeats this sentiment:
“‘If I hadn’t bought this dress, perhaps he wouldn’t have fallen in love with
me, and then I should still be living at Old Farm, and Ma would have her
cow . . . ’” (228). And while she presents her desire to return to Old Farm
as the land “calling her back,” her mother keeps emerging into her thoughts
and into her conversations with others. It is not an experience of the land-
scape that draws her back, but a desire to make amends to the mother for the
poor trade—cow for dress—that she made and for which her mother suffers.
Dorinda’s discussion of her mother with Dr. Burch gives rise to her desire to
start a dairy at Old Farm; however, this discussion of the dairy farm is con-
nected to Dorinda’s moment of identification with her mother:

‘Poor Ma!’—She corrected herself: ‘Poor Mother, the farm has eaten
away her life. It caught her when she was young, and she was never able
to get free. . . . I sometimes think she hates it, but I know it would
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 87

kill her to leave it. It is like a bad heart. You may suffer from it, but it is
your life, and it would kill you to lose it.’ She broke off, pondered deeply
for few moments, and then added impulsively, ‘If I had the money, I’d
go back and start a dairy farm there.’ (243)

This discussion about her mother occurs in the context of Dorinda’s sexual
response to the concert she and Dr. Burch attend. Her responsiveness to the
music impresses the doctor who can only experience the music as an “intel-
lectual exercise” because he has mastered it as a science; Dorinda’s desire to
“master the chemistry of agriculture,” then, functions as a mastery of her sex-
uality, a distancing of herself both from the doctor’s advances and from the
sexual images of the landscape that the music arouses and that are associated
with Jason. But it is also a desire not to “have her life eaten” away by the farm
as her mother’s life has been. Dorinda sees Eudora’s devotion to the land as
a form of captivity; the mother can neither escape nor make a difference in
the land that she inhabits. In this context, however, the land also eats away
at the mother’s body; like Rufus, it is pictured as an ungrateful child whose
own lack of production becomes the pitiful sign of Eudora’s maternal inef-
ficacy. Thus, Dorinda’s desire to transform Old Farm into a dairy farm acts
as both a connecting link between mother and daughter, and a displacement
of Dorinda’s identification with Eudora as a symbol of female subjectivity
trapped within the agrarian narrative.
Dorinda reiterates her desire to start a dairy farm as she watches Mrs.
Faraday nurse her baby; she tells her, “‘I wouldn’t let anyone touch the
milk and butter except mother and myself ’” (246). The maternal scene of
nurturing is transposed into the impersonal discussion of the dairy. Discussing
the dairy farm, Dorinda is able to avoid Mrs. Faraday’s encouragement to
marry and have her own children with Dr. Burch. And, within the context of
the dairy, Dorinda is able to reimagine her relation with her mother. Earlier
in the novel, Rufus received his share of Eudora’s butter and Dorinda went
without, because she had traded the cow for the dress. But this image of
“mother and myself ” being the only ones to touch the milk and butter, in the
context of Mrs. Faraday’s breast feeding, reimagines the scene of mother and
daughter estrangement as the possibility of an externalized fulfillment within
the impersonal structure of the agrarian plot. For although she constructs her
return to Pedlar’s Mill as a desire to reclaim the land, in the same conversation
with Dr. Burch in which she speaks of the farm eating away her mother’s
life, she tells him, “‘Old Farm must be made to pay’” (246). This mission
to reclaim Old Farm, then, appears secondary to her desire to extract some
form of retribution from the land that has cheated her mother of nurturance
88 Keeping Up Her Geography

and her ability to nurture her own daughter. The land has cheated Dorinda
of her maternal possibilities as well, inasmuch as it is Dr. Greylock’s concern
for Five Oaks that thwarts her marriage to Jason, leading to her own eventual
miscarriage—and her refusal to consider a future that includes motherhood.
In order to reclaim Old Farm, Dorinda must repress her sexuality
and remain silent about her miscarriage, because both her illicit sexuality
and illegitimate pregnancy are trespasses against the agrarian order. And
the consequence of articulating either is vividly illustrated within the text
through the story of Geneva Ellgood. The miscarriage and the gendered
identity that she has buried in order to compete with Jason “man to man”
(401) is made manifest in the story of Geneva Ellgood. She is connected
to Dorinda through her assumption of Dorinda’s place as Jason’s wife, but
she also emerges into the text as the bearer of Dorinda’s repressed feelings
about her miscarriage. She appears in a swathe of blue (Dorinda’s color) on
Nathan and Dorinda’s wedding day; this is also the day that she drowns
herself in the old mill-pond which is referenced earlier in the text when
Dorinda looks into Bob Ellgood’s eyes and sees herself as “clearly as if her
features were mirrored in the old mill-pond” (my italics; 292). This ref-
erence connects Dorinda to both brother and sister, since what she sees
in Bob’s eyes is herself reflected impersonally “as if she had been a man.”
Dorinda’s refusal to speak of the personal past that connects her to the
Ellgoods and Jason must be spoken by Geneva, who runs through the
countryside claiming that Jason has killed her child. Geneva, of course, is
punished with confinement and self-destruction for making this claim that
no one believes; representing the female reproductive self that Dorinda has
buried within her commitment to a masculinized and agrarian relation to
the land, Geneva manifests Dorinda’s inability to articulate her own feel-
ings of loss and victimization. The “mirror” of the regionalist aesthetic is a
mirror of death for the female subject, literally in the case of Geneva, but
for Dorinda as well, in as much as she now sees herself mirrored in the
landscape as an agrarian, as a masculine subject.
Other critics have noted that Glasgow uses a discussion about the
breeding of dairy cows as a metaphor for Dorinda’s own suppressed thoughts
about both her sexuality and her miscarriage.11 However, critics—looking
toward Dorinda’s relation to, and shaping of, the land—have failed to see
how this metaphor operates to bring together the agrarian and romantic
plots of the novel. Nor have they noted that it is the dairy that supports
and makes possible the reclamation of the land at Old Farm, and eventually,
Dorinda’s acquisition of Five Oaks. Dorinda refuses to sell any of the pines
at Old Farm. Instead she markets the aesthetic and sentimental quality of
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 89

the harp-shaped pine that fills her father’s gaze as he is dying by placing its
image upon the butter she sells. Saving the pine from becoming a material
object of exchange she uses its properties as a symbol of the South to market
her butter as a regional product. And, thus, she trades on the marketplace’s
desire to consume southern rurality. This structural exchange in which the
aesthetic symbol of the land is saved by trading on the reproductive products
of female labor, the milk and butter, reveals what Dorinda herself cannot
articulate within the structure of agrarianism: that the regional aesthetic is
sustained by the labor of the female body.
The double displacement of female reproduction—the suppression of
the female body and the extraction of its labor—makes possible Dorinda’s
reclamation of the land, both as property and as a symbol of her victory over
Jason. But the recognition, of how female labor and reproduction support
the “impersonal” structures of agrarianism, requires articulation in the text
through structures of displacement precisely because Dorinda must access
her triumph through the canvas of landed property—a canvas that unifies
men from generation to generation but, in which, the female subject may
be—and apparently is—drowned and consumed. This may be one reason
that Barren Ground’s plot seems increasingly static—Dorinda’s increasingly
narrowed perspective relegates the gendered dilemmas of agrarianism to
the elusive and suggestive margins of the text. Reproduction is confined to
secrecy, metaphor, the racial other, and the mentally ill.
This narrowing of Dorinda’s perspective is directly related to her fear of
tenancy, of being subject to the gendered and raced economics that define,
and confine, female reproduction within the boundaries of property. In
effect, this fear is told through Jason’s failure. His descent into the poor-
house is articulated in the same terms that are used to describe Dorinda as
she waits by the side of the road listening for the carriage that carries Jason
and Geneva. As Jason, having been taken in by Dorinda, waits to die, his
glance across the horizon is described as if he were “scarred and burned out
by an innerfire” (514) and Dorinda realizes she cannot reach him, because
she “could make no impression on vacancy” (514). Having been caught by
the broomsedge against which Dorinda has struggled since her return to
Pedlar’s Mill, Jason’s silence acts as a mirror of her own inability to articu-
late her continued personal sense of “expectancy” (413, 466). Dorinda has
reclaimed Old Farm and Five Oaks, but neither of these acts produces within
Dorinda the “freedom from expectancy” that she desires. Dorinda appears to
be waiting for the (re)birth of an emotional subjectivity that has been con-
fined to the racial metaphors of the narrative. Moreover, earlier in the text,
when Dorinda arrives at the poorhouse to retrieve the impoverished and ill
90 Keeping Up Her Geography

Jason, a narrative gloss disrupts her perspective, explaining what Dorinda’s

property-structured vision cannot see:

Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once
made a fence, the poorhouse sprawled there, in the midst of the life-
everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which buzzards
had picked clean of flesh . . . Dorinda, however, perceived none of the
varied blessings attendant upon orderless destitution. All she saw was
the ramshackle building and the whitewashed cedars, which reminded
her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences of dry bones surrounding
the huts of Ethiopian kings. (498–499)

This description of the poorhouse expresses a narrative vision at odds with

Dorinda’s perspective; it repeats the metaphor used to describe the land at
the novel’s beginning. This is tenancy represented as freedom, freedom from
the boundaries that determine property; the poorhouse needs no “fence”
and “sprawls” amidst nonproductivity. And Dorinda associates this image of
tenancy with Africa, projecting onto Jason—and the one indigent mother
who also occupies the poorhouse—and this environment of “orderless des-
titution” and “liberty” the image of her own younger self, and once again
she racializes that image. This racialization of the propertyless is a rejection
of the boundaryless freedom represented in the poorhouse, and the female
subject that reproduces outside the boundaries of property. Just as once she
imagined herself as a “thing” as foreign and faraway as Africa, now she proj-
ects that alienness onto those who are outside the legitimating structures of
inheritance.
Dorinda instead continues to look toward the land as property to pro-
vide her with the difference that she desired as a young woman. Earlier in
the novel, Dorinda looks across the horizon from Old Farm and yearns to
complete her vision of ownership by possessing Five Oaks: “As far as she
could see, east, north, west, the land belonged to her. Only toward the south
there were the pale green willows of Gooseneck Creek, and beyond the feath-
ery edge she saw the red chimneys of Five Oaks. But for those chimneys she
would have felt that the whole horizon was hers!” (362). And yet, once she
has gained Five Oaks, she discovers “the horizon of her freedom still farther
away” (413). This “freedom” Dorinda desires is nothing more than the desire
that originally structured her vision of the land, and that continues, despite
her successful transformation of the land: to transform the land into some-
thing different. However, Dorinda can only transform that “narrow vista”
that defines the space she owns. For example, she is unable, or unwilling,
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 91

to step outside the perspective of the landowner to transform the “public

roads.” The roads at Pedlar Mill “are still impassable,” because, Dorinda tells
John Abner, the tenant farmers are “indisposed” to doing their share of the
work (438). Similarly, after the war Dorinda is unable to find “negroes” will-
ing to work to keep the roads repaired so that she can move her butter and
the products of the fields. Public roads are like illegitimate children, they
threaten to disrupt the integrity of a culture that makes the land as prop-
erty an inheritable form of culture; they belong to no one. To “stray” into
the public roads is to occupy that space outside the inherited structures of
agrarianism, to occupy the space of tenancy, of Idabella, to occupy that space
which Dorinda herself once inhabited.
Dorinda’s perspective as a property owner considers the labor of oth-
ers only in terms of that space with which she “wrestles.” Locating her own
identity within the reclamation of the land, she has little patience with the
propertyless ‘happiness-hunters’ that threaten that identity by their refusal
to labor for her. Her paternalism even extends to John Abner, the eventual
inheritor of her property. She tells Nathan, “that she hoped [John Abner]
would marry some girl she herself should select” (410). If her attitudes reflect
the vision of the Ellgoods and the Greylocks that brought about her own
earlier romantic break with the land, then it is this very vision that makes it
possible for her to reclaim, in the end, her aesthetic vision of the land as a
“natural” lover:

Yes, the land would stay by her. Her eyes wandered from far horizon
to horizon. Again she felt the quickening of that sympathy which was
deeper than all other emotions of her heart. . . . the living commu-
nion with the earth under her feet. While the soil endured, while the
seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of
sowing and reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never
despair of contentment. (525)

The land as an aesthetic space, here, represents a naturalized plenitude that

suppresses the structure of labor and property that goes into maintaining
Dorinda’s “integrity of vision” (525). This structure of feeling that makes pos-
sible an aestheticization of the return to the land as a cyclical space no longer
needs to articulate the difference that gender makes. Having safely buried
Jason, Dorinda safely buries the self whose illegitimate reproduction threat-
ened to disrupt the boundaries of property, and its integrity as an inheritable
form of culture. And yet, Barren Ground, as a text that trades on readers’
desires to see the regional aesthetic as sustained by a naturalized plenitude,
92 Keeping Up Her Geography

functions like Dorinda’s butter, marked with the harp-shaped pine that rep-
resents Old Farm. It offers readers the satisfactions of a southern regional-
ism marked by the paternal symbol of the land, but it is female labor that
they consume: the female labor, productive and reproductive, that makes the
regional aesthetic possible. Both author and heroine produce regional cul-
tural products that mimic regionalism’s repression of the female body—its
sexuality, reproduction, and labor. But that body continuously reemerges in
the text—through Geneva, in Dorinda’s dreams, and through the dairy’s rela-
tion to the mother—to remind heroine and reader of its displacement.
Whereas Glasgow firmly situates the plot of Barren Ground within the
cultural and economic framework of regional property, in Vein of Iron she
more freely explores the notion of a regionalist female subjectivity emerg-
ing outside this framework. The similarities between the two novels suggest
that Glasgow returns, in Vein of Iron, to the issue of how gender and the
regional are mutually constituted, and attempts to rewrite Dorinda’s story
outside the limits imposed upon it by the agrarian narrative. Within this
context, Glasgow experiments with a regionalist identity attached to place
that does not depend on the land as a form of cultural inheritance, and,
that might, therefore, allow for a discussion of female sexuality, reproduc-
tion, and labor as constitutive elements of regional culture. Thus, in Vein of
Iron, the land as a site of regional identity acts not as a mirroring canvas for
the reproduction of a seamless cultural identity, but instead, becomes a shift-
ing context for Glasgow’s reexamination of those southern spaces outside the
aesthetic conventions of southern regionalism: the wilderness, the meadow,
and the urban. Glasgow appropriates these spaces in order to challenge the
gendered structures of agrarianism; nonetheless, at the end of the text, she
reformulates the gendered structure of agrarianism through suburban ide-
ologies. This reformulation, however, is as problematic as agrarianism itself,
because it burdens the female subject with the reproduction of agrarian feel-
ing, even as it reencloses those feelings within a private space more detached
from the public history of the South than the enclosed spaces of property in
Barren Ground.
Set in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia, Vein of Iron relates the
story of the Fincastle family from the turn of the century to the mid-1930s.
While the narration often presents the story from John Fincastle’s perspec-
tive, it is his daughter Ada who provides the dramatic impetus for the text’s
plot; and although the novel begins when she is ten years old, it is the adult
Ada’s romance with Ralph McBride that drives the narrative. Just as Dorinda
loses Jason to Geneva, Ada must relinquish Ralph to another woman, Janet
Rowan. The prosperous Rowans believe that Ralph is the father of Janet’s
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 93

unborn child (she later miscarries) and force Ralph to marry Janet. Later,
Ada and Ralph, now separated from Janet, unite and produce their own ille-
gitimate child. With Ralph away fighting in World War I, Ada, her father,
and Aunt Meggie take the baby to the city and away from the disapproving
villagers of Ironside. In the city, Ada and Ralph are finally married. How-
ever, a series of personal and public disasters—Ralph’s paralyzing accident,
the Depression, John Fincastle’s death—contrive to send the family back to
Ironside in the novel’s closing pages. Here, however, it becomes apparent that
the reproductive and sexual agency that Ada claims for herself in the text is
dependent, not only on rejecting the strictures of property that define Dorin-
da’s subjectivity, but on an erasure of that history. This novel reveals how the
domestic plot—which Dorinda escapes—may function as an erasure of the
relation between private and public history that critics find it difficult to
incorporate into the southern regionalist paradigm, and yet that manages to
define regionalism’s legitimate boundaries: the history of land as a form of
inheritance that legitimates certain subjects and marginalizes others. In this
sense, Glasgow finds it equally difficult to incorporate that relation into the
novel’s end. Ada’s devotion to the familial past as a narrative that transcends
the historical structures that define the city, the village, and the wilderness
can function only through a dismissal of how the agrarians’ cultural organi-
zation of property effectively organizes the present.
Vein of Iron is set in the village of Ironside in Shut-In Valley. As its name
suggests, the valley is surrounded by mountains, physically and culturally
secluded from the traffic of civilization. However, it is not the inhabitants of
the village, but those that exist on its margins that form the narrative’s center.
Glasgow provides not a description of the village itself, but instead narrates
its boundaries through the perspective of ten-year-old Ada Fincastle. On
each side of the village, with the church between, are homes that represent its
physical and spiritual boundaries. On the one side is the Fincastle place, the
Old Manse, “slightly withdrawn from the village” (5). The manse is more a
part of the village’s frontier past than representative of its present: “During
the hours between dusk and daybreak the manse seemed to separate itself
from the village, to shed the covering of communal life, and to slip back into
the wilderness” (106). It connects Ironside to its origins in the wilderness—
both the pioneer past of warfare with the Shawnees who originally inhabited
the mountains, and the inbred enclaves of Panther’s Gap, a grotesque carica-
ture of the “shut-in” valley below. The Fincastles settled Ironside, but John
Fincastle’s philosophical break with the doctrine of predestination has made
the manse a place where only “profane learning” may be taught and cost him
the church where his father, and his father before him, was minister.
94 Keeping Up Her Geography

On the other side of the church is Murderer’s Grave where Mrs.

Waters, a former prostitute, lives with her idiot boy, Toby, in a hovel sur-
rounded by pigs. Murderer’s Grave is the burial place of a man who was
hanged for killing his adulterous wife. If the manse represents the spiritual
and pioneer past of a people committed to their faith, then Murderer’s
Grave represents the cost of both imposing those strictures upon the vil-
lage’s inhabitants and of breaking the tenets of that faith. Toby and Mrs.
Waters live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the village,
and yet, they act as a physical embodiment of a transgressive and violent
past that the village cannot fully incorporate into its history. This geo-
graphical tension between the two homes, which are so different and yet
similarly situated in relation to the village, is made more dramatic through
the connections the text makes between Ada and the Waters. Though it
recalls the suppressed identification between Idabella and Dorinda in Bar-
ren Ground, an identification suppressed because of its racial implications,
here, Glasgow has removed the racial barrier, making possible a more direct
connection between Ada and Mrs. Waters, who like Idabella, lives beyond
the “social shadow line.”12
Ada, herself, prefers not to look at Mrs. Waters, because she feels
“as if a bodily disfigurement had been thrust before her eyes” (71). Mrs.
Waters’ is a “bad woman” and that badness is visited upon Toby, whose
idiocy represents the marginal “worst” of existence for Ada; his physical
disfigurement belies the inner innocence that structures his relations with
others, making him the village children’s prey. The novel opens with the
children of Ironside chasing Toby across the fields toward the barren ravine
where his home sits. Ada experiences a sudden shifting of subjectivity in
which she becomes the pursued, and begs the others to stop: “In a flash
of vision it seemed to her that she and Toby had changed places, that they
were chasing her over the fields into that filthy hovel” (4). This feeling of
being both pursued and pursuer dramatically defines Ada’s position in the
text, and it is Ada’s experience of this double subjectivity that provides a
means of understanding how Glasgow’s erasure of the regional’s framework
of race and property makes possible a more explicit identification between
the former prostitute and Ada.
This identification remains problematic, however, because it is filtered
through Toby and complicated by the identification that the text seems to
make between Mrs. Waters and the despised female subject of the text who
threatens Ada’s happiness. Mrs. Waters most often appears in the text when
Ada feels threatened by Janet Rowen, the more sophisticated and beauti-
ful daughter of the town’s most prosperous business owner. When Ada and
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 95

Ralph fight at a barnyard dance, she goes home, and he takes off to be with
Janet. While Ada stands at the window contemplating the strange triangle
between herself, Janet, and Ralph, only the single light from Mrs. Waters’
hovel illuminates the darkness. It burns so late that Ada believes there must
be something wrong at the house. This single light from across the fields
only mirrors Ada’s own late night vigil and the troubles associated with Janet
and Ralph that preoccupy her. Standing at the window, Ada fretfully asks
herself, “‘What is it about Janet?’” (189). But she is unable to articulate the
sexual transgressiveness that Janet represents; only through the vision of Mrs.
Waters’ home, as a representative site of female illicit sexuality, does the book
allow Ada’s question to be answered. However, it is Ada who finds herself
alienated, like the Waters, from the village and her family, because of the
night’s events. The light that shines from the hovel “like a vindictive eye”
falls upon Ada rather than the sexually transgressive Janet (190).
Janet’s accusation against Ralph costs Ada the future she has carefully
planned: a middle-class home in the city of Queenborough, a life of domestic
order and upward mobility, in which she would live something of the gen-
teel and romantic life that her mother relinquished when she married John
Fincastle. Although Janet’s father is not a farmer, it is his position as a male
propertyholder that makes the coercion of the poor and fatherless Ralph—
the most likely father of the baby is a wealthy farmer’s son from another
village—acceptable to the rest of the community. The community believes
Janet’s story because they must believe it; paradoxically, however, no one
really believes that the “fibber” Janet is telling the truth. Even the Fincastles,
so often out of step with the village, agree that Ralph must marry Janet, even
if Janet is lying, and even if it means the sacrifice of Ada’s happiness. Ironi-
cally, since the chivalric code of the South demands that the (white, upper
class) woman must be believed, she is never fully believed. Glasgow reveals
how damning the South’s gendered code of chivalry, based also on class and
race, is to both women’s expression of sexual desire and their ability to rep-
resent themselves through their own narratives. Janet’s social and economic
position prevents her open expression of sexual desire, and curtails Ada’s
sexual relationship with Ralph. On the other hand, Ada—and by extension
the reader is asked to do the same—chooses Ralph and damns Janet because
of her reputation. This moment of romantic loss, then, has both feminist
and antifeminist implications. Whereas Janet assumes a position of wayward
female sexuality, becoming, like Mrs. Waters, a “bad woman,” this is also the
moment at which Ada breaks free from the gendered codes of property and
inheritance that define the community’s insistence on Janet and Ralph’s mar-
riage. At this moment in the text, while Janet’s sexuality is paralleled to that
96 Keeping Up Her Geography

of Mrs. Waters,’ it is Ada who finds herself physically and emotionally drawn
to the social and spatial position occupied by the woman and her son.
Ada’s experience of this betrayal produces a scene similar to the one in
which Dorinda learns of Jason’s marriage to Geneva. Her sense of alienation
from the family and community is imaged through her relationship to the
land:

Until this moment of anguish, she had felt that she was a part of the
Valley, of its religion, its traditions, its unspoken laws, as well as of its
fields and streams and friendly mountains. But now her heart was torn
up from its place, mangled and bleeding. Only a jagged scar was left in
the spot where her life had been rooted. (140)

This “jagged scar in the earth” has sexual connotations that are difficult
to ignore, representing Ada’s introduction to sexuality and reproduction.
Although her body maintains its innocence, her spiritual and emotional self
is violated by the gendered social codes that protect Janet, the same codes
that reject Mrs. Waters and herself. Murderer’s Grave—where Toby and his
mother live—is itself described as a “scar on the landscape” (142). And Ada
feels driven to Murderer’s Grave after her final meeting with Ralph: “Pain
had thrust her out of the smiling meadow into this unhealed wound in the
earth” (141). The metaphor in which a jagged scar represents her displace-
ment from the pastoral innocence of the meadow—where in good pasto-
ral fashion the sheep graze—to a place of exile associated with transgressive
female sexuality, once more collapses the distance between Ada and Toby,
as she finds the young man crawling across the ravine toward her, confront-
ing her with his repulsiveness. Toby and Ada (not to mention the murderer)
are both products of “bad women”; their broken lives are the manifestations
of the sins of others. Toby’s idiocy is not his fault, anymore than the sacri-
fice of Ada’s happiness by the village and her family is the result of her own
transgressions. Nevertheless, both are the victims of the community. And
just as Ada imagines that the barren ravine—a scar upon the earth where
nothing grows—represents the murderer’s “revenge” upon the community
that hanged him, so is Toby a kind of revenge upon the community that has
abandoned his mother. It is not, then, Mrs. Waters with whom Ada identi-
fies at this moment in the text, but with the outcast Toby.
However, the text does identify Ada with another woman who trans-
gresses the boundaries of the village. The other woman’s story most relevant
to the plot of Ada’s romance with Ralph is the story of Great-great-grand-
mother Tod, who is taken captive by the Shawnees as a young girl. In the
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 97

wilderness, she marries a member of the tribe and bears a child before being
returned to the village. After her return, although safely married to a settler
with whom she has several children, she is known to get a look of “wildness”
in her eyes and retreat into the mountains. The wilderness represents a place
of captivity for Grandmother Tod, but later becomes a symbol of her “wild-
ness,” and the village becomes a place of captivity. The story of Grandmother
Tod vividly illustrates how the meanings of place shift within the text. This
shifting has been a somewhat problematic concept for critics to grasp, because
it means that places signify differently across time, and according to the sub-
ject’s placement within a broader geography of power. This shifting is most
obvious in the Fincastles’ varied relation to the wilderness; whereas, in Barren
Ground, the investment in the land, as a site of cultivation and inheritance,
provides the background for Dorinda’s narrative, it is this shifting relation to
the wilderness that defines Ada’s experience.
The space that informs Vein of Iron, is not the farm, but the wilderness.
The manse’s past is shown to be a complex history of negotiation between
the settlement that the Fincastles help produce, and the wilderness that often
represents their difference from that settlement. The concept of wilderness
has a long history in United States culture.13 It is not, however, generally
considered a defining landscape in southern regionalism of the interwar
years. Nor, with a few notable exceptions, does the Indian generally appear
as a cultural signifier within Southern literature of the period.14 Its use in
Glasgow can be seen as a deliberate appropriation that seeks to undo the land
as inherited property/culture that informs the regionalist paradigm. There-
fore, before addressing the problems that this appropriation presents, I want
to address how Glasgow’s paradigm shift makes possible a reposing of the
problematic place of female sexuality and reproduction within agrarianism.
The pioneer Fincastles settle in the wilderness, motivated by their
desire to practice their religion outside the sectarian arguments that inform
the already settled communities. But the first John Fincastle is also chas-
ing a very typical dream: “John Fincastle thrust out toward the frontier. The
mood of the wilderness flowed into him and ebbed back again. He was pur-
suing the dream of a free country, the dream of a country so vast that each
man would have room to bury his dead on his own land” (18). However, it
is the Fincastles’ difference from the other settlers that makes the land as a
site of property an elusive dream. The first John Fincastle forges a relation-
ship with the Indians that surround the settlement; he is defined as both
“trespasser” and “friend and protector” (19). He risks his own life for the
Cherokee, pitting himself against the community: “It was told of old John,
the pioneer, that he was strung up and half choked by a party of hunters
98 Keeping Up Her Geography

because he refused to give away the hiding-place of some Cherokees who had
trusted him. . . . Roaming white men, he wrote down somewhere, were
his abomination. . . .” (122–3). Eventually, he returns to the mountains as
a missionary, carrying only a bible and book of “profane learning,” a text of
Eastern philosophy.
His history is reflected in Great-great grandmother Tod’s story, and
in Ada’s grandmother’s continuing ministrations to the families of Panther
Gap, who live deep into the mountains. According to her son, they repre-
sent “. . . . a stalwart breed, the true American Highlanders. In pioneer
days their forefathers had fled from the strict settlements, some because they
could breathe only in freedom, and others to escape the laws of the Tidewa-
ter” (15). John Fincastle, Ada’s father, does not venture into the wilderness
physically, but exists in the spiritual wilderness of religious exile. His mother
believes that he has inherited the “wildness” of Grandmother Tod in a dif-
ferent form. And it is this spiritual wildness that has cost the Fincastles the
dream of the land as property: the manse has been mortgaged, because of
John’s loss of his position in the church. So, the text is clear in its associa-
tion of the wilderness with that which represents otherness to the villagers:
spiritually, culturally, and economically. Inasmuch, as the manse is said to
slip back into the wilderness, it threatens to slip out of the agrarian narra-
tive and into a prior mode of living undefined by the kind of ownership
that defined the first Fincastle’s relation to the land. The cultural inheritance
handed down from father to son of the position of pastor to the village has
already been broken. So, although, John Fincastle may be said to nominally
represent that regional artist/yeoman who is as comfortable with a hoe as he
is with his books, he has broken faith with the village and with its past.
Ada, too, slips back into the “wilderness” when she rebels against the
village’s conventional codes of gender and sexuality, and decides to take her
chance at happiness with Ralph. Grandmother Tod’s “wildness” is also con-
nected to Ada’s meeting with Ralph on the old Indian Trail. Ralph returns to
Ada before leaving to fight in France. Janet has decided to divorce him, and
he and Ada decide to begin again. They do not wait until the divorce, how-
ever, to consummate their relationship. Instead, they retreat to a mountain
cabin at the end of the old Indian Trail. The mountains emerge as a place
of “unlawful love” and freedom from the judgment of the villagers and the
Fincastles (200). They are, Ralph claims, “‘escaping from worse things than
Indians’” (192). The village is seen as a site of entrapment, while the wilder-
ness exists as a place outside those structures that seek to separate them from
one another. Despite the bloody history of the place, Ada experiences “a new
sense of security” and “permanence” and feels “as if time were going by and
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 99

leaving [them] alone on an island of happiness” (186). Ironically, however,

the village has made the wilderness this safe place of retreat; the settlers’ ear-
lier trespass upon the land makes it a place where Ada and Ralph can play
at being Indians without encountering any. And, it is this disturbing notion
of the “wilderness” that informs, and mars, Glasgow’s attempts to rethink
the female subject’s place within the agrarian narrative—to undo the codes
of gendered sexuality and cultural inheritance that structure female sexual-
ity and make motherhood an untenable narrative for the female southern
subject.
Beyond the realm of the regional as property is the wilderness as a
place where the female subject may experience herself as a subject free of the
constraints that define her within the terms of southern cultivation.15 Ada’s
identification with the wilderness as a space outside the historical construc-
tion of property that limits Dorinda’s vision in Barren Ground allows the
romantic plotting of the wilderness to surface as an escape from the restric-
tions imposed on the female subject by the structure of regional culture. The
wilderness supposedly belongs to no one—and, of course, it is the Shawnee’s
nonpropertied concept of the land that makes it possible for the settlers to
possess it as their own; unfenced and uncultivated, possession is made pos-
sible in the experience of space itself and the subjective meaning—as divine
place, as terrifyingly godless, as a sanctuary, or, as a site of leisure and sol-
itude—that is placed upon it. Wilderness is a space where contestation is
made possible, because ownership is not visibly defined; it is not “shut-in”
by the conventional codes of property and gender that define the village.
This freedom, however, can be recovered by Ada, only because the empti-
ness of the wilderness, as much as its freedom, is part of her own regional,
cultural inheritance as well. This may be why it is not within the context
of the wilderness, of her “island of happiness,” that Ada reexperiences her
identification with the land. It is in the meadow, that “middle landscape” of
the pastoral tradition, that she experiences her strongest relationship to the
wilderness as an ahistorical space outside the inherited structures of Southern
culture.16
At this point in the text, Ada is pregnant with Ralph’s child, and has
exiled herself—on the advice of the minister and her father—from the
village. She has refused to repent her time with Ralph, and her grandmother,
in turn, refuses to acknowledge Ada’s presence in the home they share. She
fears the judgment of her grandmother and the villagers, and ruminates
on the hardships of the pioneers’ wilderness past in light of her current
troubles. She wishes she could give birth to her child in the wilderness, just
as Grandmother Tod gave birth to her firstborn among the Indians. The
100 Keeping Up Her Geography

wilderness, once again, appears first as a place of hardship, and then, a place
of refuge from the kind of censure under which Mrs. Waters lives: better
to be a part of the wilderness than to exist in exile on the social boundaries
of the community. Ada’s contemplation of this desire to escape, leads to
an epiphany that she expresses only when coming to gaze upon her father
and Tommy, a young member of the only black family in the village: “‘Side
by side,’ she exclaimed, ‘and it doesn’t make the slightest difference to the
earth that one is a philosopher and the other a piccaninny!’” (218) This
is a startling proclamation, particularly since it transmutes Ada’s thoughts
about her illegitimate pregnancy into an understanding of racial difference as
historically constructed.
Ada’s epiphany seems to suggest that women’s sexuality and the notion of
illegitimacy—based on Grandmother Tod’s reproduction with a heathen—are
historical constructions that make no difference to the “earth.” The epiphany
about female reproduction leads to a similar articulation about race. However,
the historical construction of race does make a difference, a difference implied
in Glasgow’s description of Tommy as a “small colored urchin” and in Ada’s
admonition to her father to send Tommy home, and John Fincastle’s prompt
command for the boy to “run home.” (218–9). The language that Ada uses to
express this revelation represents, in and of itself, the inadequacy of Ada’s con-
struction of the earth’s indifference to the historical structures that define race,
gender, and reproduction and the wilderness itself. Also, Ada’s pastoral revela-
tion has little effect upon subsequent events that occur in the novel. Because
Ada’s time in the meadow, as well as her time in the wilderness, engages space as
an ahistorical construct, the earth, it allows for a reemplotting of the romantic
vision of the landscape, a vision similar to the one that defines Dorinda’s after
she meets Jason. At this moment in the text, Glasgow reveals how the land as
property, as a form of cultural and economic inheritance, is transformed into
a regionalist aesthetic: an aesthetic that promises the freedom from the differ-
ences, and thus, the inequalities of history, through its very indifference to the
constraints of gender, class, and race. Ada’s identification with the earth relies
on a dismissal of how the history of property and gender constructs the wilder-
ness and the meadow as contexts for this identification. However, Glasgow’s
investigation of this intersection, of how the romantic and agrarian plots mutu-
ally inform one another, lasts only as long as it takes for Ada to articulate her
revelation within racist language, and only as long as it takes her to find herself
once again face to face with Mrs. Waters.
Despite her pastoral meditation, Ada cannot help wondering whether
her child, like Toby, will be born an idiot. As it turns out her son, Ranny, is
not, but Ada does not escape punishment. When she ventures into the town
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 101

to fetch the doctor for her dying grandmother, she finds herself suddenly
pursued by the village children:

. . . because she ran, flushed and frightened, they stopped play and
pursued her toward the churchyard, as they so often in the past had pur-
sued Toby Waters. . . . Half in malice, half in sport, the children were
romping about her, pelting her with bits of red clay or tufts of weed
with the roots still attached. . . . A lump of soft clay struck the back
of her head; behind her the voices of children—or were they idiots?—
were babbling. She had reached Murderer’s Grave, her foot had almost
touched the slippery edge, when the gate of the hovel burst open, and
Mrs. Waters and Toby rushed, amid a swarm of pigs, along the rim of
the ravine. Stopping with a hysterical laugh, Ada watched the woman
fling the hogwash from her pail into the flock of tormentors. (230–1)

In a reversal of the novel’s opening scene, Ada herself flees toward Murderer’s
Grave and finds herself defended by both Mrs. Waters and Toby. And yet,
she flees from Mrs. Waters just as quickly, afraid of what the villagers will
think if they see the two women together; she is also still repulsed by the lack
of morality Mrs. Waters represents. In fact, Ada condemns herself in a like
manner when she imagines, immediately after this incident, that her sexual
sins have brought about her grandmother’s death. Whatever identification
between Ada and Mrs. Waters Glasgow seeks to establish, Ada, like Dorinda,
remains separate from, different than, the bad woman of the text.
Glasgow undermines this identification in other scenes of the novel
as well. Near the novel’s end, as John Fincastle, sick to the point of death,
makes his way back to the manse, he has a vision from his own childhood.
He remembers traveling into the mountains with his own mother to visit a
family in Panther’s Gap:

While the sweat broke out on his skin, and every pore seemed dripping
with fear, the family flocked from the cabin and began to dance round
him, singing and jeering. And as soon as he saw them he knew what
he had dreaded—for they were all idiots. His mother had brought him
to one of the mountain families that had inbred until it was imbecile.
Two generations of blank, grinning faces and staring eyes and drivel-
ing mouths danced and shouted round him as they pressed closer and
closer. A world of idiots, he thought in his dream. To escape from them,
to run away, he must break through not only a throng, but a whole
world of idiots. . . . (399)
102 Keeping Up Her Geography

For John Fincastle the mountains are not as clearly a place of sanctuary as
they are for Ada and Ralph. In these two passages it becomes apparent that
the village and the wilderness produce equally “savage” children. And despite,
John Fincastle’s earlier defense of the mountain people as “a stalwart breed,
the true American Highlanders” (15), he also tells Ada and his mother, “‘That
was the trouble of a village, . . . ‘All likes and dislikes are in-bred until they
become like the half-wit families over in Panther’s Gap’” (63). According to
Ada’s father, the physical inbreeding of Panther’s Gap merely represents the
social and intellectual inbreeding of the village. The similarity of the two
scenes has a further significance because Mrs. Waters comes from a family in
Panther’s Gap. And although the novel appears to represent Toby as the result
of Mrs. Waters’ illicit sexuality outside marriage, at least one critic has read
Toby as the offspring of Mrs. Waters and her father (Harrison 38). Thus,
Glasgow undermines, through this suggestion of incest and Ada’s son’s own
healthiness, the initial suggestion that Toby is the result of illicit female sexu-
ality. Toby, in this reading, is the result of “pioneer” inbreeding, of that place
that is like the village in its rigid conformity to notions of cultural inheri-
tance, only more so. At the same time that Glasgow frees Ada from the codes
that would suppress female sexuality and reproduction outside marriage, she
names incest—the father’s desire for the daughter—as the means through
which Mrs. Waters becomes the prostitute, “the bad woman,” of the text:
the desire to maintain land as a form of cultural inheritance, represented by
the stalwart pioneers of Panther’s Gap, becomes a conduit through incest for
the production of idiots and bad women. This suggests that the “stalwart
pioneers” in Panther’s Gap and their spiritual and moral equivalents in the
village produce bad women and idiots as part of their regional histories and
not as transgressive deviations from that history. They are not illegitimate
transgressions of regional culture, but products of the regional’s concern for a
history founded in the land as culture.
However, these two similar episodes—Ada’s with the village children and
her father’s with the children of Panther’s Gap—suggest that the Fincastles act
as mediators between these two seemingly divergent places. If the Fincastles’
mediating position between the wilderness and the village seeks to reveal how
they are mutually constitutive of one another, then, this mediation collapses
even as it is revealed: Ada’s fear of becoming the pursued, the very quality that
makes her identify with Toby Waters and convinces her to go with Ralph into
the mountains, also reinforces her desire to escape from Mrs. Waters and any
identification that the villagers might make between herself and the woman.
Her grandmother’s death conveniently allows the family to move to Queen-
borough, so that Ada can escape from these conflicted feelings: represented
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 103

not only in her conviction that she will not repent her “cardinal sin,” but, also,
that her actions are punished by her grandmother’s death, that she has “killed”
her grandmother. In other words, her grandmother’s death both frees Ada
from occupying a position in which she must represent the relation between
the incestual idiocy of Panther’s Gap and the village’s obsession with women’s
legitimate reproduction, and forecloses a narrative that might reveal the ways
in which Mrs. Waters already represents this position from her hovel on the
other side of the village.
The family abandons its untenable position between the wilderness
and the village when they escape to Queenborough. As in Barren Ground,
the city becomes the means through which the regionalist narrative can
be reconstructed from a distance. However, the sexual politics that emerge
from Vein of Iron’s sojourn in the urban environment are clearly different
from those of the former novel. In effect, when Glasgow severs the connec-
tions made between Ada and Mrs. Waters, she appears also to abandon any
attempt at reexamining how gender functions within the regionalist para-
digm. She seems more interested in differentiating Ada from those women
who challenge the sexual and labor conventions of regionalism than making
an identification between Ada’s sojourn in the wilderness and what Glasgow
terms the “contagion of wildness” that seems to have overtaken the women
of the city. The city, in this analysis, represents that wilderness that has not
been emptied of its dangers; if the old Indian Trail represents a wilderness
space capable of acting as a refuge for female desire, then the city is a “wilder-
ness” whose inhabitants are as dangerous as the Shawnees once appeared to
the pioneers of Ironside.
In the city, a new kind of regionalist formulation is established within
Ada’s consciousness between those who are “civilized” and those who are
“nomads”(241). Civilized people are peoples who stay put, who make a
home of their surroundings, whether they own them or not. And the most
civilized women are women like Ada’s mother, her grandmother, Aunt Meg-
gie, and Ada herself. The dangerous women of the text, Janet and Minna, are
nomads, revealed in the text as modern women who threaten, not only to
take away Ada’s happiness (like Janet Rowan), but also to transform her into
one of them:

In Shut-In Valley each separate individual had projected above, or

aside from, the community. The bold outlines of the frontier had not
flattened to a uniform level. But this mass movement of living seemed
to threaten that precious identity she called her soul. . . . They were
all alike. . . . especially the women—all wore that stare of bright
104 Keeping Up Her Geography

immaturity, all moved with flat bosoms, with narrow hips, with twist-
ing ankles on French heels. . . . Hundreds of women—of women
trying to look like boys and to fill the places of men! Would the swarm
seize her at last and distort her outline into a caricature of male ado-
lescence. (243)

Glasgow again uses the metaphor of the “swarm” to suggest an anonymous

and alien presence that threatens regional culture. And in this passage,
regional culture is being threatened inasmuch as Ada comes to represent that
culture in the urban section of the novel. The narrative’s wholesale rejection
of postwar modern womanhood represents a retreat from the examination
of the place of female sexuality, reproduction, and labor in the agrarian nar-
rative. Within the city, Ada takes up the mantle of the home, and it is this
difference that denotes her superiority to the women around her: “Wherever
she went she would carry her way of life with her, as the pioneers had carried
their Bibles beside their flintlocks and their shot pouches” (264). Ralph refers
to her as “the last home-lover,” (276) and as a “good sport.” Both breadwin-
ner and homemaker, her devotion is likened to those pioneer women of the
past—their ability to make a home where there is none—who are far supe-
rior to the “puny” breed of women that now surround her (272).
Thus, Ada finds herself, once again, in an untenable position; she can-
not identify with the women of the city, nor can she, yet, face returning to the
village where she has been treated so cruelly. Moreover, she finds the events
of the village repeating themselves in the city. After several years of marriage,
Ralph, now a car salesman, takes up with a young flapper, Minna, who lives
next door. The two have an accident that leaves Ralph paralyzed. Ada is once
more forced to defer her own desires because of Ralph’s relations with other
women. Ralph’s illicit sexuality leads in this case to Ada’s inability to have the
daughter she desires. It is as if, having made the point that the regionalist aes-
thetic makes motherhood untenable for the female subject in Barren Ground,
Glasgow must reiterate this claim from a different perspective in Vein of Iron.
Although this incident forces Ada to finally consider, “‘What had really hap-
pened with Janet’?,” she keeps her suspicions about Ralph’s truthfulness to
herself. In this way, the woman who has lost her inheritance remains faithful
to the agrarian ideal despite her dispossession. Whatever Ada learns from
this repetition of the Janet incident, it cannot affect her actions: she may
have been transplanted to the city, but as surely as Eudora Oakley remains
trapped within the agrarian narrative, so too is Ada wedded to her notion of
the romantic past she shares with Ralph, a romantic past that is defined by
its transgression of the agrarian narrative. But it is also a transgression that
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 105

supports the very structures it defies, because it only enhances Ada’s desire to
reclaim her place within the romanticized past of her mother and father.
Although Ada challenges the sexual economics of agrarianism when
she reproduces outside the boundaries of property, she continues to harbor
a romantic desire to reclaim that past as her own. In Barren Ground, the
land and the dairy represent Dorinda’s unarticulated relations with Jason and
her mother; in Vein of Iron, it is the Bland House, within the city, and the
manse at Ironside that come to represent Ada’s unspoken desire to reclaim
the southern past for her own future. As in Barren Ground, Glasgow margin-
alizes issues of female sexuality, reproduction, and labor, displacing personal
structures of identification onto the impersonal spatial structures that repre-
sent those desires. However, rather than serving as a critique of gender rela-
tions, as in Barren Ground, this displacement’s avoidance of Ada’s gendered
position within the text serves to use her as a vehicle for the reclamation of
an ahistorical past rooted in the imaginary significance of the Bland house
and, later, the manse as a site of romantic renewal.
Having disconnected herself from her personal past in Ironside, hav-
ing escaped from becoming a Mrs. Waters, Ada now dreams of reclaiming
her mother’s past as a member of Queenborough society; she even dreams of
having the “manse as a summer home” (308). Ada’s notions of romance are
firmly rooted in the southern past, another example of her rejection of the
urban present. She and her father share a similar passion: both find them-
selves drawn to the Bland house, the family house of Mary Evelyn, Ada’s
mother. The house represents for John Fincastle a specific, personal past; the
romance that seems to cling to it emerges from his memories of meeting
Mary Evelyn there. However, Ada sees the house as representing a romantic
past that acts as a possible model for her future with Ralph and Ranny. The
Bland House represents Ada’s desire for a past that her mother relinquished
when she married John Fincastle; but it also represents the “dignified” south-
ern past, and is rendered as the site of “an ancient nobility that had fallen on
vulgar times” (259). Ada wants to reclaim this past as her own, but when she
turns to the Blands for help during the Depression she learns that this past is
merely a “vanished illusion”: the Blands, too, have lost everything. Although,
at this moment, Ada loses her desire to reclaim the southern past as now
inadequately represented by the Blands, she does not relinquish her desire to
retreat from the urban environment and the “vulgar times” that continuously
threaten the family’s ability to make a home “in the wilderness.”
Ada’s father, however, represents an ethical position in the text that
seeks to undo this romanticism. Even as he engages in a personal withdrawal
into the past, he remains open to the future represented by the men—and
106 Keeping Up Her Geography

the women around him. Ironically, the Fincastles locate in the city a neigh-
borhood community for themselves in which John finds a more secure place
for himself than he ever experienced in the village. No one cares about John’s
doubts about predestination in the simple neighborhood where the Fin-
castles make their home. John is the only character within the text able to
experience the present as more similar to than dissimilar from the past. The
specter of a racial history that Ada seeks to ignore through her identification
with the earth emerges into his consciousness as a reminder of the public
history that forms a backdrop to her personal romanticizing of the Bland
house. A speeding car filled with a careless group of young people hits a
black fruit peddler, and they do not stop to help the old man. John begins
to contemplate the recklessness of youth in the postwar era, but the episode
ends with an image that suggests the hit-and-run is merely a historical repeti-
tion of the “roaming white men” who haunted the first John Fincastle. The
episode causes him to alter his usual habits, instead of stopping, as usual, to
gaze at the Bland house, “ . . . he hurrie[s] on because the face of the old
Negro floated before him in the shadows under the elms” (260). This image
of a black face in the trees suggests a history of racism that makes the reck-
less white faces of the car appear as present day variations on a past that is
far different from the romantic image that Ada has of it. John, however, is
dying, and this sense of the relation of past and present is not passed onto
Ada who remains firmly within her romantic conception of southern history.
Although it is John’s dying journey to the manse that necessitates the family’s
return to Ironside, it is Ada who decides that the family should stay. And, it
is clear that Ada disregards her father’s conception of history—his sense of
the continuity between the violence of the village’s wilderness past (its battle
with the Shawnee, the settlement of Panther’s Gap) and the reckless violence
of the city—when she makes this decision.
Her return to Ironside can only be understood as a desire—that very
closely resembles the agrarians’—to embrace a familial history that tran-
scends both the political and personal differences that history makes, specifi-
cally those structured through ownership. Ironically, Ralph, whose instability
blocks Ada’s desires as much as the impersonal economic structure of the city
and the cruel judgments of the village, is left to represent the historical past
that Ada’s perspective disregards. When Ada suggests they return to the manse
to live, Ralph states, “‘It takes conviction to set out to despoil the wilderness,
defraud Indians of their hunting-grounds, and start to build a new Jerusalem
for predestinarians. . . . ’” Ada, however, replies “‘Don’t be bitter, Ralph.
It doesn’t help to be bitter’”(404). Thus, Ralph’s historical perspective on the
inheritance that Ada wants to claim is thrown aside as a marginal comment;
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 107

Ralph’s alienation from the village is unimportant. There is no suggestion

that this history—the violent wrenching of the land into a legitimate form of
property, of cultural inheritance—can have a lasting affect upon the present.
And Ada is willing to forego the relation between past and present if it inter-
feres with her desire to reclaim her place within the village. That this same
history structures her desire remains unexamined within the text. Glasgow
seems to be claiming in the novel that female subjects function just as Lytle
describes them in the “Hind Tit”—as the “mainstay of the structure” of agrar-
ianism. In Vein of Iron, the removal of property as the primary canvas through
which regional identity manifests itself reveals the female subject’s position
as a primary conduit of regional inheritance. This regional inheritance, how-
ever, is not framed primarily in agrarian terms; it is agrarian only in its belief
that “feeling”—located in the familial place—has no relation to the history of
which it is a part.
So, although Ada appears to occupy an agrarian position in the closing
pages of the novel, this would be too simplistic a reading of the text’s end-
ing. Indeed, when the novel was published, Glasgow discouraged critics from
seeing it as agrarian, but critics have—perhaps understandably—focused on
this “feeling,” rather than the substance of the text’s conclusion. The ending
has, in many ways, been grievously misread by those who desire to see the
family’s return to Ironside as representative of her agrarian sympathies. In a
letter to critic John Chamberlain, Glasgow corrects what she sees as his and
others’ misreading of Vein of Iron:

The life at Ironside was village life, and the farm, or farm life, is not
treated anywhere in my novel. My characters do not ‘find a way out of
economic difficulties by going back to the subsistence farming of our
ancestors.’ . . . They go back to a simpler way of living; but their
livelihood will depend, not only upon the good will of their neigh-
bors, but upon the growing use of such industrial inventions as the
motor car and the tractor plough in the valleys of the James and the
Shenandoah. (200)

Yet critics continue to view the text as Glasgow’s most agrarian novel. Most
recently, Elizabeth Harrison argues that the novel is Glasgow’s attempt to
“envision [a] farm community where shared labor eliminates class, race, and
gender hierarchy” (14). However, not only does the ending not suggest a
return to nonspecialized gender, class, and race roles that define the city, it
acts as a correction to the inversion of those roles that Ada experiences in the
city.17 Here, she will be able to work in her own home, while Ralph returns
108 Keeping Up Her Geography

to work selling tractors to farmers. It seems to me that critics are overcome—

like the agrarians—by the aesthetic of the return to the past, so they impose
their own desires upon Glasgow’s ending: to see the novel as an affirmation
of nonhierarchal relations, of living off the land, and a rejection of the mate-
rialism and nomadism of urban culture. It is most particularly the latter that
Glasgow’s ending represents, but the return to the village assumes the shape
of suburban desires—a return to traditional male and female labors and the
desire to locate one’s homelife away from the “wilderness” of the city and the
economic history it represents—more than agrarian ones.
Whether she means to or not, Glasgow reveals in her ending, and
critics reveal in their misreadings, how, as King terms it, the “Southern
family romance” may function in the absence of land as a form of cul-
tural inheritance as a cultural ideal that transcends the boundaries of its
origins in physical property. This “feeling” that Ada has for the “earth” is
more similar to Eudora Oakley’s relation to the land, than it is Dorinda’s
(404). When Ralph warns her that they will be “‘peasants without land,’”
Ada replies, ‘Nothing can make peasants of us but ourselves. Grandmother
had less . . . but she wasn’t a peasant. Living with the savages didn’t turn
Great-great-grandmother Tod into a savage’” (404). In this sense, it is the
familial history rooted in place that secures Ada’s retreat from the “wilder-
ness of machines,” but, as Glasgow notes, it is agrarian only in its sugges-
tion that this “feeling” can overcome the history that structures it. More
accurately, this last scene reflects an imaginary construction cleansed of the
need to examine hierarchies of race, gender, and culture, where such an
examination is confined to the realm of bitterness or to an ethical philoso-
phy, such as John Fincastle’s, that has expired without leaving a mark upon
the community that rejects it.18
The historical hierarchies here revealed are only seemingly independent
of the land and of the gendered codes of southern regionalism that attend
forms of cultural inheritance. Although the boundaries of agrarian regional
properties are trespassed, they remain intact through the cultural distinction
the novel’s ending makes between nomads and the civilized. The manse, Dr.
Updike claims, has been inhabited by a gypsy and his bear who have left the
house’s “air . . . tainted by that wild, roving smell” (402). Ralph, himself,
represents a form of this nomadism, since he must continue to participate
in the economic and cultural modes of the urban environment. However,
while Ralph goes to work selling tractors in the valley, Ada will represent
the civilized, will be the “rock” upon which he depends. Glasgow’s “happy”
ending reveals how suburban desires reflect and adapt the agrarian model
of Southern culture. However, this suburban model, ironically, posits the
The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 109

alienation of the male subject from the land, while the female subject assumes
the burden of this cultural inheritance through “feeling.”
In Barren Ground, Glasgow’s assumption of the gendered and raced
agrarian gaze reveals the costs of privatizing culture and of mistaking Dorin-
da’s assumption of that perspective as feminist. Dorinda must marginalize
all that has gone on, that goes on in the “public” roads, as a manifestation
of individual (female) aberration, and in order to escape such aberration she
must definitively suppress that female self which represents the limits of the
agrarian vision. When Dorinda goes to the poorhouse, she must ignore the
illegitimate mother who occupies the house with Jason and the others, and
focus only on the dispossessed agrarian son whose vision she has appropri-
ated as her own. Vein of Iron, however, suggests that Glasgow was attempt-
ing to reincorporate the aberrant into an agrarian vision of culture that has
room for a female figure, but she cannot imagine anyone but white women
and the subordinate “social” figures of the village carrying out that work. In
reasserting the dignity of the illegitimate female figure, Glasgow is unable to
imagine a female agrarian vision that does not mimic the gendered ideologies
of suburbanization. Ironically, Ada’s experience in the city mimics the experi-
ence of the urban working-girl, but her solution to the transformed South
is to retreat from the complexities that such an experience represents, and
reenclose the female figure in the private world of feeling,—as her mother
did before her. Seeing in the complexities of the public/private dichotomy an
economic and political process that can only subordinate women’s feelings,
Ada retreats.
Ada retreats from the complexities of the public sphere, but the two
authors I examine in the next chapter are engaged in exactly the opposite
project. Turning from Glasgow’s privatized heroines, I turn once again to the
issues raised in chapter one by the Representative Congress of Women and
analyze the attempts of Zora Neale Hurston and Agnes Smedley to incorpo-
rate themselves into the public sphere as representative American citizens.
Chapter Four
Bitter Locations:
Self-Representation, Gender, and Nation

Traditionally, autobiography has been seen as a genre closely allied with

Western masculine and bourgeois constructions of the individual, a genre
associated with the notion of a coherent self capable of truthfully narrating
the development of that self as a representative individual. However, con-
temporary theorists of autobiography challenge this view of the genre. These
critics work on two fronts: the rereading of canonical, traditional autobi-
ography from a poststructuralist perspective that emphasizes the textuality
of the genre, and the analysis of how autobiography functions as a mode
of self-representation that authorizes and legitimates certain narratives and
subjects and throws suspicion and doubt upon others. Feminist critics have
been particularly interested in how the genre limits truthtelling in women’s
autobiography: how truth, self, and experience are defined through gendered
cultural contexts that often limit subjects’ ability to tell their story.1
Despite autobiography’s association with a particular kind of individual,
in the United States autobiography has been particularly important as a genre
capable of establishing its author as a American individual, a representative
citizen. Lauren Berlant describes this process of becoming representative as
crucial to the subject’s ability to be heard and recognized: “it is always the
autobiographer’s task to negotiate her specificity into a spectacular interiority
worthy of public notice” (457).2 Therefore, it has been an important genre
for U.S. authors of color (particularly African-Americans), immigrants, and
white women. It is generally agreed, however, that these authors have had
to negotiate differently the requirements of the genre—what critic Phillip
Lejeune has called the autobiographical pact—in order to claim the truth-
fulness of their experience and authorize private identity within the public
sphere of the nation. As Berlant suggests, there is an implicit contradiction
in the attempt of a subordinate subject to articulate the representativeness of
her interiority, to transform herself into the subject of experience, within the

111
112 Keeping Up Her Geography

same public sphere that depends for its cohesiveness on the marginalization
of her experience.
Thus, as Leigh Gilmore notes, in The Limits of Autobiography, because
autobiography is structured through “the interpenetration of the private and
the public” (13), and, whereas this interpenetration may have—or have been
read as—a coherent seamlessness for the traditional subject of autobiogra-
phy, this interpenetration may produce problems for subjects who are not
authorized to speak within the public sphere.
While some feminist studies of trauma have seen writing about gen-
dered subordination in the private sphere as a means of empowerment, the
formal expectations of autobiography may, in fact, prevent an author from
transforming private subordination into feminist politics. The traditions of
Western individualism may affect a female author’s ability to write the self
out of the same master narrative that marginalizes her experience and rejects
female embodiment, since both may question the coherent mastery of self
that traditional forms of autobiography and citizenship require.
The autobiographical texts of Agnes Smedley and Zora Neale Hurston
provide a context for examining how female subjects negotiate this public/
private divide to present themselves as representative Americans, because
both authors address issues central to the construction of the self as a citizen
within American democracy. However, I argue that both authors are unable
to incorporate their personal experience of gender into the public framework
of citizenship. This inability is structured by the authors’ use of the frontier
as a framework for understanding American character, and I argue that the
use of the frontier as a location for representing the self ultimately under-
mines their ability to articulate the difference that gender makes in the con-
struction of national identity.
As I discussed in chapter one, even as women speakers at the Colum-
bian Exposition were attempting to articulate a feminist vision of citi-
zenship, a vision articulated through the social interconnectedness of the
individual, Frederick Jackson Turner was simultaneously announcing the
“closing of the frontier.” This articulation of the frontier as a historical loca-
tion determinant of the American character turned the mythology of the
West into a geohistorical fact, an understanding of American character and
American nation-making that was to remain largely unchallenged until the
1930s. The ascendancy of Turner’s version of the American citizen and the
geographical understanding of those origins is nowhere more visible than
in the texts of Smedley and Hurston. One of the challenges of this chap-
ter is to attempt to understand why Smedley and Hurston each turn their
back on the feminist vision of citizenship articulated at the Exposition. For
Bitter Locations 113

in their articulation of themselves as “frontier” subjects, the authors reveal

the limits of the women speakers’ articulation of citizenship, uncovering the
class and race based fissures that so many of the actors involved in the Expo-
sition sought to gloss over.
The spaces that I examine in this chapter are more varied than in previ-
ous chapters. The primary spatial term that is relevant here, however, needs
explanation and definition. The term “location” is more abstract and more
resonant within feminist theory than in American studies, because it is pri-
marily concerned with the subject’s position relative to an overlapping grid
of spaces—from the physical to the ideological. For example, in feminist the-
ory, it owes its origins to Adrienne Rich’s “politics of location” in which Rich
defines location as “the geography closest in—the body,” but also as that site
on the map through which identity is located, an epistemological standpoint
that defines the subject’s position within other sites on the map.3 From this
perspective, Smedley and Hurston appropriate the location of the frontier as
a map for understanding their place within the nation, as they write them-
selves into national and international contexts. Each author engages with the
frontier as a particularly American and masculine space that historically has
provided a model for U.S. representativeness, however debatable the accu-
racy of that model may be, and their defining of themselves within this loca-
tion determines how they come to represent gender within their texts.
In this chapter, I am concerned with how the female subject’s bodily
experience of and positioning within the ideological space of public and pri-
vate is formed by and informs her entrance into national space as an Ameri-
can citizen, as an explicitly political subject. I am particularly interested in
the difficulties that attend the articulation of this position for the two writ-
ers I look at here. I argue that this conundrum of the explicitly gendered
and political subject’s entrance into national space preoccupies both writ-
ers to the extent that both—in radically different ways—relinquish their
attempts to contextualize their gendered experience within the public frame
of citizenship.
In many ways, Hurston and Smedley’s texts anticipate contemporary
feminist debates about the representation of female subjectivity in U.S. cul-
ture. The writers’ difficulties enact the tensions inherent in contemporary
feminist politics between the claims of agency and self mastery that represent
women’s full incorporation into citizenship and feminist desires to restruc-
ture what it means to be a citizen so that feminism does not reinforce a sys-
tem of disembodied citizenship that universalizes elite white male experience
as representative of the public sphere and treats feminist complaint as private
aberration.
114 Keeping Up Her Geography

I. “LYIN’ UP A NATION”

Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), occupies a con-

troversial position within the Hurston canon. And, although a recently
restored edition may represent Hurston’s version of the book before her
white publishers excised key passages that they felt were either libelous,
politically problematic, or irrelevant to the story of Hurston’s life, this res-
toration does not make the book any more coherent as autobiography—or
fiction, or cultural commentary, for that matter. So, as Pierre Walker notes,
despite the restored material, past criticisms of the text remain relevant to
a reading of the work: “Three complaints recur most in critics’ ambiva-
lent response over the years to Hurston’s autobiography, and they no doubt
account for much of the book’s relative scholarly neglect: its apparent unre-
liability, its inconsistency or fragmentary nature, and its seemingly assimila-
tionist politics” (387). The poststructuralist response to these criticisms has
been, as Walker does, to see “inconsistency” and incoherency as Hurston’s
“theme” (389), or to see the text’s form and content as a deliberate ignor-
ing of the “autobiographical pact” (Snyder). Feminist critics, however, have
not generally taken this approach to the text. To the contrary, they have
seen the text as an affirmation of black female identity, one that “affirms
the significance of female bonding in women’s search for their identities”
and which represents black women who are “strong and powerful models
of black female subjectivity” (McKay 62). Only Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
expresses reservations about Hurston’s construction of black female iden-
tity: “[Hurston’s] identification with other black women remains shaky”
(82). My own reading of gender in Dust Tracks emerges from a perspective
similar to Fox-Genovese’s, but I want to address issues of gender within the
public/private dichotomy set up by the text, Hurston’s deconstruction of
the essentialism of race, and how both of these are informed by Hurston’s
attempt to rethink the nation.
I suggest that in part the formal incoherence of Dust Tracks has to do
with the complex ways in which gender and race intersect for Hurston, and
her attempt to appropriate a white, masculine model of democratic citizen-
ship and make it serve her own ends. If this model authorizes the public
Zora Neale Hurston, it is less applicable to the female subjects who inform
Hurston’s self-representation. In other words, Hurston’s self-authorization
requires a conceptual framework that marginalizes both gender as an analytic
frame and black women themselves; nonetheless, I believe that this marginal-
ization is not seamless, but actually creates the incoherence of the autobiog-
raphy. Finally, I want to address the geocultural grid of the United States and
Bitter Locations 115

how it complicates and helps shape—in theoretically disabling ways—Hur-

ston’s notions of gender, race, and citizenship.
Hurston’s text has generally been regarded as divided into two sec-
tions: the first eleven chapters seem rather traditionally autobiographical,
detailing her early homelife in Eatonville, her years working as a maid and
manicurist while attempting to obtain her education, her success in New
York as a student of anthropology, her research in the field, and her career
as a writer. The second section of the text is divided into five chapters on
love, religion, race, politics, and friendship; there are also several appen-
dixes restored to the text that were part of the original manuscript. The
chapters are not necessarily tied to one another and could function quite
easily as independent essays. However, like other critics, I attempt to read
the two sections as related to one another. In fact, the two sections could
be seen as divided into the private and the public: the first section an artic-
ulation of the domestic and social constructions of gender, race, and class
within the Hurston household and within the community of Eatonville;
the second details the public Zora Neale Hurston whose private life is con-
tained within one section on love. Moreover, gender, so important in the
first section of the text, is absent in the second section. In the first part of
my argument, I examine the first section and explicate how central gender
is to the formation of Hurston as a writer and to her narration of her child-
hood in Eatonville. Then, I turn to the second section of the text and dis-
cuss how gender becomes an essentialist category when she locates herself
in the public, a category not subject to the same sort of political analysis as
race and nation.
Although critics have emphasized the extent to which Eatonville
informs Hurston’s life and work, they have failed to address Hurston’s repre-
sentation of Eatonville as a frontier in Dust Tracks. Hurston, herself, points to
the significance of location to the narration of the self in her opening section:
“ . . . you will have to know something about the time and place where
I came from in order that you may interpret the incidents and direction of
my life. I was born in a Negro town”(1). This is Hurston’s first lie: Hurston
was not born in Eatonville, but in Alabama. Later she narrates her birth in
Eatonville, adding layer upon layer to this “fictitious” location of herself. The
location of Eatonville as the place of origin thus becomes doubly significant.
The lie and the stories that develop from this original mis-location of herself
testify to Hurston’s deep emotional and intellectual investment in what the
town represents. The town is the first Negro community in America “to be
incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of
Negroes in America” (1). Moreover, it is a frontier development, still wild
116 Keeping Up Her Geography

with its founders’ restlessness, a “burly, boiling, hard-hitting, rugged-indi-

vidualistic setting” (7). Three white men from the North come to settle in
Southern Florida and found the town of Maitland; later they donate land for
the African-American town of Eatonville. So Maitland, the white’s settlement
of “mostly Northerners” and Eatonville, filled with southern blacks looking
for an improved life, form a complex settlement: “these wealthy homes, glit-
tering carriages behind blooded horses and occupied by well-dressed folk,
presented a curious spectacle in the swampy forests so dense that they are
dark at high noon” (4). Eatonville reflects both this northern investment in
the cause of African-American emancipation, including social and moral
uplift as well as self-governance (the whites from Maitland donate a church,
a library with books, and a general assembly hall) and this curious site at the
edges of the “swampy forests.” Thus, Eatonville represents a site that is nei-
ther South nor North, but partakes of both and of the spirit of the frontier
as well.4 And it is the northern and frontier influences in Eatonville that have
generally been overlooked in scholars’ understanding of Hurston’s represen-
tation of the town and its significance to her.5 But, before explicating this
significance, it is important to understand how gender becomes constructed
within the community and within the Hurston home. For it is the raced and
gendered intersection of selfhood as she experiences it within the home and
within the black community that helps produce Hurston’s investment in the
frontier.
Crucial to the construction of gender in the text is its construction
within the Hurston household. Critics have tended to focus on Hurston’s
representation of her childhood as nostalgic or structured around her rep-
resentation of the folk, but much of the first section of Hurston’s text is
fraught with the author’s sense of rejection and alienation within her own
household and within the community. In Dust Tracks, gender is with Hur-
ston, as she tells it, from the moment of her birth: her femaleness is a
“dirty trick” played upon a father who sees her as one girl too many. He
unfavorably compares her with her older sister, Sara: “My older sister was
meek and mild. She would always get along. Why couldn’t I be like her”
(14). And her father explicitly defines Zora’s impudence as a sign of her
difference: “‘you ain’t white. . . . I don’t know how you got in this fam-
ily nohow. You ain’t like none of de rest of my young’uns” (29). Hurston’s
father, John, attempts to silence his daughter, fearing what will befall her as
an adult among whites if, as a child, her “sassy tongue” is not curbed. Hur-
ston tells the reader, “Let me change a few words with him—and I am of
the word-changing kind—and he was ready to change ends” (19). “Word
changing” is likely to devolve into violence within the Hurston household,
Bitter Locations 117

because Zora cannot conform to her father’s expectations of how a black

female child should speak.
John Hurston also attempts to silence Hurston’s mother. Instances of
enforced silence saturate Hurston’s narration of the home. When Lucy Hur-
ston threatens to leave her husband, he threatens to kill her; when she takes
too much pleasure in having a friend’s husband escort her, he walks her home
with a rifle pointed at her back, and Hurston says that later “the subject could
never be mentioned before Papa” (10–11). Similarly, when Lucy Hurston
appropriates an old folk saying to chastise her husband for not taking care
of her and the children: “She definitely understood, before he got through
carrying on, that the saying was not for her lips” (10). So, although Hurston
later implies that her mother usually got the best of her father in verbal alter-
cations and that her father never beat her mother, the implied threats in each
of these episodes suggests that both Lucy Hurston and her daughter spoke
within understood boundaries established by Hurston’s father.
Hurston’s mother is presented more sympathetically within the nar-
rative; she encourages her children to “jump at de sun” (13), and stands
between Zora and her father. But Lucy Hurston attempts to restrain her
daughter’s spirit in other ways. Hurston’s mother hates her daughter’s ten-
dency—so much like her father’s—to wander: “If she had her way, she meant
to raise her children to stay at home. She said that there was no need for
us to live like no-count negroes and poor white trash—too poor to sit in
the house—come outdoors for any pleasure, or hang around somebody else’s
house” (13). This quote reveals Hurston’s mother to represent that form of
black bourgeois uplift that makes class—rather than race—the sign of differ-
ence; and Zora’s mother expects her daughter to conform to the bourgeois
conventions of both class and gender. When Zora discovers she is too strong
to play rough with girls, she simply plays with boys, but“[t]he fly in the oint-
ment there, was that in my family, it was not lady-like for girls to play with
boys” (30). Zora’s parents, then, attempt to restrain her. And, although crit-
ics have sometimes noted the gendered tension in Hurston’s representation
of the folk community (most particularly in Their Eyes Were Watching God
and Mules and Men), they have not examined how the gender dynamics of
the Hurston household are reflected within the dynamics of the community
in Dust Tracks.
The silencing of women that Zora’s father attempts to enforce within
the household is also present within the gendered dynamics of the commu-
nity, particularly on the store porch, “the heart and spring of the town” (45).
As in Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God, the verbal arts of the
store porch, the lying sessions held there, are a part of masculine culture that
118 Keeping Up Her Geography

women rarely enter into. Whereas men routinely gather on the store porch to
tell tales, women have a different relation to the porch:

Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world
and the next one through their mouths. The right and the wrong, the
who, when, and why was passed on, and nobody doubted the conclu-
sions. Women stood around there on Saturday nights and had it proven
to the community that their husbands were good providers, put all of
his money in his wife’s hands and generally glorified her. Or right there
before everybody it was revealed that he was keeping some other woman
by the things the other woman was allowed to buy on his account. (45–
46)

The economic and sexual basis of gender conflict within the community
represented here has already been represented by Hurston in the story of
her own family. She narrates similar stories about her mother and her Aunt
Caroline. Critics have seized upon the portraits of Aunt Caroline and Lucy
Hurston as resistant models of black female subjectivity, but, for a number
of reasons, I read the repetitiveness of these stories more ambivalently. First,
they indicate the extent to which the women speak out against and physi-
cally confront one another in public, but neither woman “speaks out” against
her husband. The stories about Aunt Caroline and her mother are illustrative
of a repetitive theme in the novel: the ways in which black women are con-
structed as rivals of one another in both sexual and economic terms.
Also, the difference between how Hurston presents Aunt Caroline’s
story and how she presents her mother’s story is significant. The stories about
Aunt Caroline are told to illustrate why her father never took Jim’s advice
to beat Lucy Hurston, as Jim beat his own wife. The first story is told from
the perspective of the men on the store porch. Aunt Caroline sees her hus-
band hiding a shoebox in the barn and assumes, correctly, that these shoes
are meant for his current “light of love.” She follows him to her rival’s house
with an axe in her hand. The men on the store porch watch all of this with
much amusement: “Cal’line had done so many side-splitting things to Jim’s
lights of love—all without a single comment from her—that they were on
pins to see what happened next” (15). Aunt Caroline’s ax may be indicative
of a kind of strength, but it is from the perspective of the porch that the
incident is narrated, as if the scene were performed for the men’s amusement.
First, the men see an underwear clad Jim scurrying home from tree to tree,
and, then, Caroline marching past with a pair of new women’s saddleshoes
and a pair of men’s pants dangling from her axe: “The porch rocked with
Bitter Locations 119

laughter. They had the answer to everything” (16). In another episode, Aunt
Caroline publicly humiliates her rival on the church steps; the rival, like the
one before, “left town in a hurry—a speedy hurry—and never was seen in
these parts again” (16).
Similar stories about the Hurston household are told more briefly and
with less amusement: “My mother rode herd on one woman with a horse-
whip about Papa and ‘spoke out’ another one. This, instead of making Papa
angry, seemed to please him ever so much. . . . The woman left the coun-
try without ever breaking another breath with Papa. Nobody around there
knew what became of her” (11). And although Hurston ends this section
with her father leaving the house “looking like he had been whipped all over
with peach hickories,” because her mother won’t stop asking questions about
his “doings,” she also concludes, “But I had better not let out a giggle at such
times, or it would be just too bad” (16). The men of the community—in
public and private—receive satisfaction and amusement, they get the laugh,
from women’s repetitious performances. The efficacy of the women’s resis-
tance is bounded by that repetition and the satisfaction that it affords the
men. The repetition as entertainment merely conveys the extent to which the
men do not take the women seriously, since it conveys a ritual in which men
never change their “doings.”
Furthermore, Hurston ends this chapter on an odd note. She imme-
diately follows the above story with a passage on how many visitors came to
their house, and how her mother carefully prepared for her guests:

Our house was a place where people came. Visiting preachers, Sunday
school and B.Y.P.U. workers, and just friends. There was fried chicken
for guests, and other such hospitality as the house afforded. Store-bought
towels would be taken out of the old round-topped trunk. . . . The
pitcher and bowl were scrubbed out before fresh water from the pump
was put in there for the use of the guest. Sweet soap was company
soap. We knew that. . . . Company got the preference in toilet paper,
too. . . . Mama would sort over her old dress patterns when really fine
company came, and the privy house was well scrubbed, lime thrown in,
and the soft tissue paper pattern stuck on a nail inside the place for the
comfort and pleasure of the guests. (16–17)

Although this seems an abrupt shift, this tacked on ending of the chapter
conveys at least two different images. From one perspective, this is a nos-
talgic memory of the Hurstons’ place within the community, a reminder of
the Hurstons’ public standing within Eatonville. However, it also records the
120 Keeping Up Her Geography

lengths to which Lucy Hurston goes to present a particular kind of household

to that community; it describes the difference between the Hurstons’ private
way of life and the image her mother constructed for others. This reading is
reinforced by a later passage in which Hurston writes of her father’s second
marriage, “Suddenly he must have realized with inward terror that Lucy was
not there any more. This was not just another escapade which Mama could
maul his knit for in private and smooth out publicly” (97). These passages
also reference the gap between the meaning of Aunt Caroline’s silent perfor-
mance and the men on the porch’s claim to have the answer to everything,
because it suggests what they don’t know: the “inside meaning” of these pub-
lic displays.6
This representation of the gendered relations in Eatonville and
within the household climaxes in Hurston’s description of her mother’s
death and the after effects that leave Hurston homeless. The most obvious
moment of silencing—of both Hurston and her mother—occurs in the
scene of Lucy Hurston’s death. Her mother asks Zora to prevent the village
women from carrying out their traditional rituals for the dying—covering
the mirror, taking the pillow from under her head, and turning the bed.
But the women and her father silence Zora as her mother looks on. Asked
to act as her mother’s voice, Zora fails. This moment in the text when
Lucy Hurston looks at her daughter and cannot speak becomes a center
against which the remainder of the first section of the text is written.
Zora continues to wonder what her mother wanted to say, and looks
to her father to give some voice to her mother’s “inside meaning”:

I have often wished I had been old enough at the time to look into
Papa’s heart that night. If I could know what that moment meant
to him, I could have set my compass towards him and been sure. I
know that I did love him in a way, and that I admired many things
about him. He had a poetry about him. . . . He could hit ninety-
seven out of hundred with a gun. . . . We were so certain of Papa’s
invincibility. . . . All that part was just fine with me. But I was
Mama’s child. I knew that she had not always been happy, and I
wanted to know just how sad he was that night. (68)

Zora is listening for her mother’s voice in her father’s heart, as if the truth
of her mother’s life could be read in John Hurston’s reaction to her death.
But John Hurston fails to offer Zora the answers she seeks. And earlier
both he and the community have been aligned against Zora’s own attempt
to speak for her dying mother.
Bitter Locations 121

But what happens after her mother’s death is as significant in the

text as the silencing that precedes Lucy Hurston’s death. Hurston’s father
sends Zora to join her sister at a boarding school. While at school, she
learns that her father has remarried, only months after Lucy’s death, and,
worse, he stops paying Hurston’s tuition. Finally, he sends a note, telling
the school they may “adopt” Zora; the schoolmistress sends Zora home on
her own dime. Hurston’s father’s remarriage, his attempt to “adopt” out
Zora, “mama’s child,” represents a final rejection of Hurston’s mother, and
seems to suggest that he was willing to permanently sever his ties to his
youngest daughter. However, the trauma of this experience of abandon-
ment is “smoothed over” in the text, when Hurston chooses to narrate her
journey home as an adventure of boat and rail travel.
Furthermore, Hurston interrupts this story of homecoming to nar-
rate a battle she has with her stepmother six years later. This battle dis-
rupts the chronology of the narrative; Hurston writes that she is so angry
thinking about her stepmother’s treatment of Sarah that she has to tell the
story right then. This strategic surrender to the demands of stream of con-
sciousness suggests that Hurston reinscribes emotional coherency as more
significant than autobiography’s demand for chronological development.
In fact, the entire telling of John Hurston’s marriage and Zora’s estrange-
ment from her father suggests that autobiography’s demand for “truth”
may be superseded by the necessity of articulating a public empowerment
in the midst of private deprivation. Thus, this battle is written as Zora’s
attempt to “pay back” her stepmother for her treatment of her father’s
favorite, Sarah: Zora heroically speaks out for her banished sister not as
a reaction to her own abandonment or to arriving home from school
and finding that her stepmother has taken possession of Lucy Hurston’s
feather-bed, a bed promised to Zora but that her father claims as his own.7
Hurston presents herself as emotionally impervious to her own abandon-
ment, reacting instead to the stepmother’s treatment of her sister.
In this battle scene, John Hurston stands silently by while Zora beats
his wife to the floor. Only after a neighbor attempts to intervene does he
separate the two. According to Hurston, however, she acts as the “cata-
lyzer” for the end of John Hurston’s marriage: “My brief appearance on
the scene acted like a catalyzer. A few more months and the thing fell to
pieces for good” (98). Hurston tells readers that her mother’s friends in
the church sought to “disestablish” the new Mrs. Hurston and that John
Hurston’s career began to decline, “As it was his foundations rotted from
under him, and seven years saw him wrecked” (98). Finally, Hurston tells
readers that she left home again after the episode with her stepmother,
122 Keeping Up Her Geography

because the air “was too personal and pressing, and humid with memories
of what used to be” (98).
However, most of this differs considerably from other family members’
recollections. Pam Bordelon has conducted interviews with members of the
Hurston family, most notably Winifred Hurston Clarke, Hurston’s oldest
surviving niece. These interviews suggest that much of what Hurston writes
about this episode and its aftermath deviates from the rest of the family’s
memories. Most obviously, Hurston claims that her stepmother and father
were divorced, that her father was ostracized from the community, and lost
his career, because of his second marriage. But Hurston Clarke claims that
John Hurston and his second wife were never divorced, and, in fact, as Bor-
delon points out, John was mayor of Eatonville from 1912–1916; he mar-
ried Mattie in 1905. According to Hurston’s text, her father’s career would
have been in decline during these years. Finally, Winifred claims, contrary to
Hurston’s representation, that the other Hurston children treated their step-
mother as their own mother.8
Maya Angelou’s reading, in the restored edition’s foreword, of Hur-
ston’s relationship with her father and stepmother seems indicative of how
Hurston wished readers to perceive this episode: “Her father remarried, and
the antipathy between them was exacerbated by the presence and actions of
a thick-skinned and malicious stepmother. Hurston found her first personal
power at the expense of her father’s wife” (ix). It is more likely, however,
that Hurston has rewritten a traumatic history of betrayal by her father and
the community as a scene of personal empowerment. She not only empow-
ers herself in this rewriting, but rewrites her mother’s death, not as an insig-
nificant event in her father and the community’s life, but as the event that
ruins his standing in that community. By rewriting her father as too weak
to succeed in the absence of her mother, Hurston explains and excuses her
father’s failure to care for Zora and reinvests her mother’s life with signifi-
cance. She also, here, remembers her mother for the community, since John
Hurston’s public success suggests that the community did not exile her
father because of his quick marriage and abandonment of Zora, but contin-
ued to support him.9
This revenge plays like the female rivalry stories represented earlier in
the text. Hurston’s story of her confrontation with her stepmother and its con-
sequences enacts a reversal of the scene of her mother’s death: her father does
not restrain her and the community speaks out against the stepmother in her
mother’s name. Hurston attempts to resolve the gendered dynamics of her
relationship with her father by enacting a retroactive revenge against her step-
mother; Hurston rewrites her exile from the family as a choice. For within the
Bitter Locations 123

dynamics of female rivalry set up within the text, it is Hurston who is banished
and never “breaks another breath with Papa”—and not her rival. Hurston’s
rewriting of the final years of her father and stepmother’s life exacts a kind of
revenge for her mother, imagining him as too weak to overcome her mother’s
absence, and too weak without Zora to act as “catalyst” to discard his ill-suited
wife. The stepmother is seen as the rival who works through a weakened John
Hurston; Zora is also able to imagine that the stepmother is responsible for
John Hurston’s poor treatment of his children: “ . . . having to put up with
what she did to us through Papa” (76). The all-powerful stepmother is banished
by a more powerful Zora who is then able to feel sorry for her father who, like
a “baby,” cannot care for himself without her mother’s “smoothing over.”
Hurston is fairly explicit in rejecting her father and the town’s model of
black masculine citizenship because they marginalize her and her mother and
make a mockery of black women’s desires. In their place, she constructs for
herself and the reader a model father who also comes to represent a model of
citizenship within the text. After narrating the story of how she is restrained
within the household, Hurston tells readers, “But I had one person who pleased
me always” (30). This is the white man who acted as midwife at her birth,
because both her father and the community’s midwife were absent. She creates in
this white man a “useful citizen” who valorizes both her tomboyishness and her
speech and fulfills his duties to his community and family, even as he fulfills the
requirements of frontier masculinity. Whereas her mother tells her not to fight
with boys and her father tells her “ ‘you ain’t white,’” her white male granny
tells her, “ ‘Don’t be a nigger.’” Compare the two men’s reactions—presented
closely together—to Zora as a baby. Her “midwife” remarks that “I was a God
damned fine baby, fat and plenty of lung power. . . . He thought my mother
was justified in keeping me” (21–22). But Hurston describes her father’s disap-
pointment at her birth: “ . . . by the time I got born, it was too late to make
any suggestions [about her gender], so the old man had to put up with me. He
was nice about it in a way. He didn’t tie me in a sack and drop me in the lake,
as he probably felt like doing” (20). The father’s intolerance of Hurston’s word-
changing and her gender is explicitly compared to the white man’s appreciation
of Hurston’s “lung power” and, apparently, an ignorance of the fact that she is
a girl and that she “‘ain’t white.’”
Moreover, the white man is the only “character” in Hurston’s story to
receive the name of “citizen.” This is surprising considering Hurston father’s
position as lawmaker in Eatonville:

[My father] was . . . elected Mayor of Eatonville for three terms, and
to write the local laws. The village of Eatonville is still governed by the
124 Keeping Up Her Geography

laws formulated by my father. The town clerk still consults a copy of

the original printing which seems to be the only one in existence now. I
have tried every way I know how to get this copy for my library, but so
far it has not been possible. I had it once, but the town clerk came and
took it back. (9–10)

Ironically, Hurston’s black father represents the lawgiver in this text, and
although this passage has been read as an indication of Hurston’s pride in her
father’s accomplishment, it represents as well the paradox of Hurston’s rela-
tionship with her father and Eatonville when she tries to steal the town’s only
copy of these laws. Hurston’s desire to appropriate black masculine forms
of law-making and citizenship is thwarted by the community’s—by black
masculinity’s—official representative.
In contrast, the man who “grannies” her personifies for Zora the fron-
tier culture of lawlessness in southern Florida, and he acts as counselor to
the young girl. According to Zora, he gives her three key pieces of advice:
don’t lie, only “‘niggers’” lie; don’t be afraid to fight, but don’t take on more
than you can handle; and, if anyone spits on or kicks you, “‘Kill dead and
go to jail’” (30–1). Hurston explains in a note, “The word Nigger used in
this sense does not mean race. It means a weak, contemptible person of any
race” (30). However, as Susan Edwards Meisenhelder notes, “his use of ‘nig-
ger’ as a universal derogatory term is, unquestionably, rooted in his equation
of ‘weak,’ ‘contemptible,’ and black” (152). The white masculine discourse
of frontier citizenship requires that she forget the difference that race and
gender make, and, in fact, denies that difference even as it depends on that
difference to define its own freedom. The white male granny speaks, after all,
from within the Jim Crow South and easily produces the term “Nigger” as an
identity in opposition to the qualities that define citizenship. And although
Hurston’s note is an effort to divorce that term from race, the fact that she
must do so, indicates the extent to which race is already implicated in the
term. The white granny goes and comes as he pleases, and, thus, comes to
define freedom and truth according to his own relation to the law; he also
has the power to name, and he explicitly uses a racialized discourse to name
those who cannot qualify for citizenship.
“Lying” on the store porch and the “lying” that the white male granny
attributes to the figure of the “nigger” are two different discourses. But most
importantly they are raced and gendered discourses. The black male commu-
nity on the store porch imagines a black nation through “lying,” through the
creation of a discourse that invokes a shared past and creates its own commu-
nity. In this sense, “lying” is a fictive construction of power and subjectivity,
Bitter Locations 125

an imaginative play upon the racial hierarchies of the dominant white cul-
ture that seeks to both explain and subvert those hierarchies.10 Nevertheless,
Eatonville as a frontier space of African-American nation-making depends
not only on the lies told on the store porch but also on the performances of
black women’s sexual/economic investment in black masculinity. In Eaton-
ville, women are more often than not the object rather than the subject of
nation-making. Although Hurston’s mother validates her own fiction-mak-
ing, women are not allowed to participate in the communal discourse of the
porch; their “doings” are the object of that discourse.
Therefore, the white male’s suggestion that Hurston can transcend
race and gender is all the more attractive to her and this unnamed white
man becomes a template for the “citizen” in Hurston’s narrative. The white
man, from his position of freedom, models a mode of citizenship that appar-
ently—and that he obviously believes—transcends these specificities of race
and gender; he encourages Zora to model her behavior on his own, regard-
less of the conditions that construct her as different: the conditions of race
and gender that authorize her father’s silencing of her in the name of pro-
tecting her from whites; the conditions of class and gender that prohibit her
from fighting with boys and participating in “lying.” When Hurston is ten,
“the hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-cussing, but very successful man, was
thrown from his horse and died. . . . Everybody said that he had been a
useful citizen, just powerful hot under the collar” (32). She describes the
characteristics that made the man a “useful citizen”:

He was an accumulating man, a good provider, paid his debts and told
the truth. Those were all the virtues the community expected. . . . No-
body found any fault with a man like that in a country where personal
strength and courage were the highest virtues. People were supposed to
take care of themselves without whining. (31)

This idea of citizenship is built on the notion of self-care, physical force, eco-
nomic independence and speech that is truthful, but that does not engage in
overt complaint.
In this same chapter on the white male granny, as an example of the
values that the citizen represents, Hurston tells her readers that on all fron-
tiers “lawing” is a sign of weakness. She tells the story of a man who goes to
court to swear out a complaint against a man who beat him up and finds
himself fined more than the defendant, because he went to court instead of
fighting back. Hurston’s description of the frontier’s relation to the law seems
a deliberate attempt to negate the significance of her father’s laws within the
126 Keeping Up Her Geography

community and to supplant his law-giving version of citizenship with the

frontier model that the white man represents. Her representation of him as a
nameless white masculine model of frontier democracy and as a model father
is crucial to understanding her subsequent characterizations of the law, the
nation, the North, and white and black women.
Hurston presents an alternative white model of the nation almost
immediately after she narrates her relationship with the old man. Northern
reconstruction ideologies in which citizenship is defined in terms similar to
those of Hurston’s mother are represented by the two white women from
the North who appear at Zora’s school.11 They single out Zora because of
her reading skill, and ask her over to their hotel to read to them; they feed
her and send her home with a fancily wrapped cylinder filled with “one hun-
dred goldy new pennies.” Later they send Hurston a package of books: senti-
mental novels, Norse and Greek mythologies, Gulliver’s Travels, and Grimm’s
Fairy Tales. Hurston, of course, prefers the latter tales to the sentimental sto-
ries “about this and that sweet and gentle little girl who gave up her heart to
Christ and good works. Almost always they died from it, preaching as they
passed. . . . I didn’t care how soon they rolled up their big, soulful, blue
eyes and kicked the bucket” (39). Implicit in this statement is a rejection of
the form of racial and gendered uplift that the northern women represent in
favor of the independence and agency represented both by the white male
granny and the masculine adventure tales.
Nevertheless, Hurston is singled out and rewarded by the women,
because of her mastery of words. These rewards separate Zora from her peers
and mark her as different within the community: “My chums pretended not
to like anything that I had, but even then I knew that they were jealous”
(38–9). But she is singled out most obviously as an object of curiosity, and,
although she will not name this, it is the novelty of a Southern black child
reading that seems to edify the Northern women donors to the school—an
indirect product of their own belief in “Christ and good works.” Zora knows
she must present herself as a child who “sincerely” likes school and as a neatly
dressed and washed version of the “sweet and gentle little girl” of the books.
In this way, Zora’s mother is awkwardly allied with northern women’s
strategies of racial uplift through her association with reading and her con-
cern that Zora behave according to the class and gender conventions of the
black middle class. Zora begins to love to read because her mother locks Zora
in her bedroom with the Bible after Zora tells a story she is not supposed
to tell. And her mother performs afterschool home teaching. Lucy Hurston
also is aware of the necessity of presenting Zora as a “lady” for the elite white
women and takes pains with Zora’s appearance before she leaves to visit with
Bitter Locations 127

them. On the other hand, whereas Zora knows that she must perform as a
child who likes school and appreciates the women’s visit for the women, her
mother defends Zora’s “lying,” her tall tales, to her own mother, refusing to
see them as a reason for discipline. Hurston, then, who hates school, never-
theless, associates it both with her mother’s ambitions for her daughter and
with her difference from the community. Ironically, the women at the school
reward her appropriation of the black male word in their sanctioning of her
speech. But this also constructs her as a particular kind of black female sub-
ject produced for the white gaze as a representation of their “good works.”
Nevertheless, the mother who authorizes Zora’s African-American version
of “lying”—and promotes her daughter as a “sincere” representative of the
desire for upward mobility within the construction of white female citizen-
ship—dies inarticulate, her desires and her life unacknowledged by the com-
munity. She is incapable of providing a model of citizenship for her daughter
that would successfully bridge the differing models of the text, allowing Zora
access to a specifically black female version of subjectivity that authorizes
a recognition of both race and gender. And it is the marginalization of her
mother’s desires in life and death that comes to represent Hurston’s own
inability to articulate a model of citizenship that would incorporate those
desires repressed through black women’s sexual and economic inequality.
In the final chapters of the first section of the text, Hurston presents
herself as model subject through the northern white uplift model. Eventually,
through hard work and help from friends she educates herself and migrates
North. Despite her original dislike of school, when Hurston leaves home
and is shuttled from one relative to another, she misses school more than her
family or Eatonville. Hurston writes herself in this section of the text as child
in pursuit of books forced into domestic service by family members who see
her only as a liability. This is particularly true in her brother’s home, where
she is promised an education, but ends up caring for the household without
pay. However, she turns her enforced migration into a story of educational
mobility and uplift, but only after discovering herself, once again, as a repre-
sentative of southern blackness. Hurston runs away to work as a lady’s-maid
with a traveling actors’ troupe. Here, she finds herself embraced because of
her difference, a difference coded as both authentic (sincere) and as southern
blackness. When she flees her brother’s home to become an actress’s lady’s
maid, she finds herself coveted because of her difference from the northern-
ers that make up the troupe: “In the first place, I was a Southerner, and had
the map of Dixie on my tongue” (104). Hurston is not so different from
other southern black migrants to the North, but she also sees herself, as her
opening narration on Eatonville suggests, not as a product of the South but
128 Keeping Up Her Geography

as a member of a southern folk community displaced and resettled on the

frontier. Significantly, Southern-ness exists only on Zora’s “tongue.” She is
not so much a product of the South, but a vehicle of its expression. In both
the theatrical company with which she travels and in the North, Hurston
becomes not only the “sacred black cow,” but also a representative of South-
ern blackness (139). In other words, the public Zora Neale Hurston is cre-
ated through the white female northern model of uplift, based as it is on her
ability to represent an authentic (sincere) Southern blackness.
These same northern liberal ideologies helped popularize to a white audi-
ence and fund the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. The congruence of the
urban North’s history of white social welfare progressivism, inaugurated in the
abolition movement, and the black migration from the South helped produce
the movement that facilitated Hurston’s creation of herself as a writer and as
a public figure. It is this ideology that makes possible the public Zora Neale
Hurston—a product of both northern women’s attempts as social mediators to
revise the cultural, economic, and social meaning of citizenship and northern
urban African-American’s focus on the folk as part of its cultural and political
heritage. However, Hurston offers only two paragraphs on the Harlem Renais-
sance as a black cultural movement that formed her primary social and creative
circle. Instead, she focuses on her educational and career achievements, her
transcendence of Jim Crow as the only black student at Barnard. In fact, what
Hurston does is recreate for herself a public family that is white. She calls her-
self the daughter of Franz “Papa” Boas, the anthropologist who acts as her men-
tor, and adopts as “godmother” Charlotte Osgood Mason, the wealthy patron
of several Harlem Renaissance artists, including Hurston, Langston Hughes,
and Alain Locke. This family is notably different from her Eatonville family:
Boas does not reject her as his daughter, but tells others, “‘of course, Zora is
my daughter’” (140). Godmother Mason doesn’t prevent her from “wander-
ing,” but provides the funds that make her travels possible. Neither sees her
blackness or her gender as a liability to her success; instead, her blackness, her
difference, is precisely that which makes her adoption by these white parents a
possibility. In the North, Hurston constructs herself as representing blackness
by appropriating the black masculinity of the storefront porch that formerly
prohibited her speech; in so doing, among whites she becomes the embodi-
ment of southern blackness’s difference.
However, according to Hurston, godmother—like Hurston’s father and
like her “granny”—has her own interpretation of the law:

“You have broken the law,” [her letters] would accuse sternly. “You
are dissipating your powers in things that have no real meaning,”
Bitter Locations 129

and go on to lacerate me. “Keep silent. Does a child in the womb

speak?.” . . . anything, however clever, in you that felt like insincerity
to her, called forth her well known “That is nothing! It has no soul in
it. You have broken the law!.” . . . Often when she wished to impress
upon me my garrulity, she would take this book from the shelf and read
me something of Indian beauty and restraint. (145)

Although this representation of Mrs. Mason seems very different from Hur-
ston’s representation of the two northern women who visit her school and
her “granny,” it reveals the similar premises that structure their interaction
with Hurston. Mrs. Mason, like the women who visit the school and the
“granny,” seeks to invest Hurston in a discourse of sincerity, creating her as
a citizen through acceptable models of reading and speaking. Zora’s writ-
ing down of “lies” makes her a mobile representative of a constituency who
performs her difference as the authentic difference of the (southern) regional
other; Zora, herself, as representative, however, must adhere to both the sin-
cerity laws of uplift and the model of the “frontier” in order to act as this
representative. She must be sincere in her representation of difference and
she cannot make complaints against the law.
Hurston’s research in the field demonstrates this paradox of her own
investment in frontier democracy, even as it most directly interrogates the
requirement of “sincerity” that underlies both white masculine and white
feminine models of democracy. Polk County, Florida is more “frontier” than
Eatonville; it is a place where the “law” has no jurisdiction: “the ‘law’ is for-
bidden to come on the premises to hunt for malefactors who did their male-
facting elsewhere. The wheels of industry must move, and if these men don’t
do the work, who is there to do it?” (146). Godmother’s law of sincerity and
silence is inverted within this frontier culture. In Polk County, ignoring the
“law” also means giving up “sincerity”: People on the job kill for “reputation”
and not out of any sincere motive. More importantly, this frontier is nota-
ble for its absence of the mother-godmother figure whose “Christ and good
works” helps produce Hurston as an “authentic” subject. In their place is
Big Sweet. Big Sweet has a become a paradigmatic figure in Hurston’s work,
because she appears not only in Dust Tracks, but also in Hurston’s Mules and
Men. But what Big Sweet points to, I argue, is the contradiction at the heart
of Dust Tracks, at the heart of Hurston’s attempt to write herself as a black
female subject into the public sphere.
While most critics focus on Big Sweet’s larger-than-life reputation as
a fearless proponent of frontier democracy (Meisenhelder, Plant), I want to
focus on Big Sweet’s “sincere” desires, her feeling of entrapment within the
130 Keeping Up Her Geography

frontier rather than her modeling of its principles for others. Big Sweet tells
Hurston,

“ . . . don’t you bother, ‘bout no fighting. You ain’t like me. You don’t
even sleep with no mens. I wanted to be a virgin one time, but I couldn’t
keep it up. I needed the money too bad. But I think it’s nice for you to
be like that. You just keep on writing down them lies. I’ll take care of
all de fighting. Dat’ll make it more better, since we done made friends.”
(155)

Big Sweet’s defense of Hurston represents not merely their different

approaches to the white man’s model of frontier democracy, but her inability
to escape that model, because of the absence of the uplift model, and because
of the absence of readers, such as Mason, to read her sincerity, since Mason’s
focus is on her as representative of the power of the law of authentic black-
ness: “[Mason] is altogether in sympathy with [the Negro farthest down],
because she says truthfully, they are utterly sincere in living” (145). What is
sincere about Big Sweet from Mason’s perspective is her difference, not how
that difference embodies the limits of the law, marked by the public nature
of both her sexuality and the economics of that sexuality; her position as
the embodiment of authentic black female difference effectively negates her
voice. Thus, Big Sweet’s “sincere” desires are forgotten in the construction of
her as a figure who “transcends” the laws of race and gender. She is, accord-
ing to myth, manlier than any man, so fierce that the representatives of the
law—the boss and the sheriff—fear her.
If the frontier is a defining location for the imagining of American citi-
zenship in the early twentieth century and within Hurston’s text, then Big
Sweet represents its imaginative limits. She is explicitly represented within
the text as fulfilling the frontier myth of force, individualism, and truth tell-
ing. Big Sweet is able to tell the truth, is unafraid to “kill dead and go to
jail,” and we are told even the Boss “won’t break a breath with Big Sweet less
he got his pistol in his hand” (154). But Big Sweet’s self-articulation occurs
from within the language of uplift and the white feminine model of “sincer-
ity,” and the truth she tells is one of failure to achieve independence from
men: she wanted to be a virgin, but must sleep with men in order to earn her
living.
Big Sweet’s “freedom” from the law makes her its ironic representative
within the black male community. Big Sweet and the women like her are
imagined as free, because the law ignores their killing of black men, giving
legitimacy to the black male contention that white men and black women
Bitter Locations 131

“is runnin this thing” (151). Paolo Boi notes a significant difference between
Hurston’s representation of men and women in Polk County: “Men bustle
around Polk County uttering jokes, songs, invective, whereas the woman
performs a solo” (200). Boi sees this solo as a mark of Big Sweet’s power, akin
to the white male granny’s, but Big Sweet’s solo not only speaks and performs
power, but unfulfilled desire as well and the conditions of race and gender
that prohibit her from participating in the chorus of male voices that imag-
ine community. The black woman and the white man are the “free” objects
through which and against which black male community is imagined. To
accept the contention that she has as much power as Hurston’s white granny
is illusory within the context of her explanation of her own “inside mean-
ing”—what she once desired as opposed to the conditions of economic and
sexual subordination that undermine her ability to act freely.12
As Kevin K. Gaines argues, one of the conventions of racial uplift is its
focus on individual character so that gender and class oppression are trans-
formed into a “volitional matter of moral conduct” (123). In this sense, we
can see how in the representation of Big Sweet the ideologies of frontier indi-
vidualism and racial uplift dovetail in their reinforcement of the system of
oppression that constitutes Big Sweet’s difference. The conventional codes of
sexuality, class, and gender are simply reversed in Mrs. Mason’s appreciation
of the folk. However, even as Big Sweet assumes the outlines of an exagger-
ated frontier masculinity, she cannot escape the oppression of herself as a
black woman. To transcend the law is, in this instance, not to transcend the
body, but to become the embodiment of the distinction between public and
private within the frontier construction of citizenship. In other words, what
ties Hurston and Big Sweet together is not their ability to transcend the laws
of difference, but their embodiment of just how much the laws of difference
matter in terms of their ability to construct that difference as race and gender
inequality. Big Sweet’s own recounting of her history counts for little in the
mythologizing of her as representative of “frontier” lawlessness.
This image of Big Sweet as both similar to and unlike the white male
granny in relation to the law is made explicitly political when Hurston
turns to black nation-making within the colonial context of the Bahamas.
Hurston represents the Bahamas, like Florida, as a frontier, in this instance
a British colony that is being used as a safety valve for England’s workers.
Here, Hurston tells of the political struggle between native Bahamans
and the recently arrived white settlers and mulattos who side with the
government. Central to the struggle is Leon Walter Young, a native hero and
representative of the people. Young takes on a young black man, Botts, who
attempts, as a representative of the British government, to carry an election
132 Keeping Up Her Geography

in another district. Young first reminds the people of Botts’ ignoble past: he
pays his poor black mother, who put him through school in England, to stay
away from his home, and he stole money from his own brother. Young, the
candidate he has picked to run against Botts, and Botts’ brother go to the
island district to rally the people against Botts. However, Hurston’s attention
is divided between the story of Young’s triumph and the story of Botts’
mother. The mother is allowed to see the boats off, but she is not allowed
to campaign against her son. Hurston reports, “They left the old woman,
mother of both the boys, on the dock. She was ragged, not too clean, and
bitter. As the boat steamed out, she was muttering, ‘God! I wish I could go! I
want to campaign against him, too!’” (my italics; 162). Supposedly this is the
story of a political hero of the Bahamas, who vanquishes another native who
has become an instrument of colonial power. However, Hurston’s focus is
not only on the mother’s “bitterness,” but also her absence at the moment of
political triumph. When the boats return, the men having defeated Botts at
the polls, Hurston goes to the dock to witness the mother’s reaction: “She had
bitter moments, but after all, she was his mother” (163). Hurston speculates
that the mother could not bear to see her defeated son’s face either because,
“she was off somewhere trying to rustle up a tuppence or two, or merely that
she did not want to look on his dear face when his pretentions had met his
realities” (163). Hurston is still—as she was at her mother’s death—searching
for the sign of “bitterness” or “love” that will articulate the female subject’s
“inside meaning,” an inside meaning similarly revealed and largely ignored
in the portrait of Big Sweet. Why does Hurston tell this story, and why,
when it is apparently a story of political cunning and native overcoming,
does she, as with the men’s stories on the Eatonville store porch, as with
the story of black male community-making through song in Polk County,
disrupt national imaginings to emphasize women’s singular placement as
performative objects—as opposed to participants in—that discourse?
What about the mother’s status prevents her from being taken over
on the political boat to participate in the political fight for nation—her
bitterness, her filth, or her motherhood? The black woman becomes a sign
and symbol of political betrayal for the anti-colonial nation, but this betrayal
does not authorize her political participation; rather it prevents it.13 The
“mother” black woman on the dock, excluded from the politics that happen
elsewhere, is both the originary point of national imaginary and excluded
because of that experience; her appearance—a result of her experience of
subjection and exclusion—disqualifies her from participation, because
it makes manifest the private history of the female body that motivates
the movement toward a national imaginary. It is also paradoxically, too
Bitter Locations 133

potentially disruptive; both bitter and ambivalent, her reaction to the son/
politician’s betrayal is not known: is her absence another sign of economic
subordination or her love? Bitter, ragged, and dirty, her body registers the
defeat and victimization engendered and unaddressed within the political
sphere of the frontier as it constructs itself as a political field for the national
imaginings of its citizens. Black male political anger is here, as in the store
porch “lies” of Eatonville, glorified as a heroic battle of words and strategic
alliances. But the bitter ambivalence of the mother must be denied as too
personal and too untrustworthy to participate in the lies of nation-making.
Once again, a tale of nation-making is disrupted by Hurston’s focus on
a scene that dramatizes black female subordination. Yet, as she has done in
the first section with her own mother, Hurston abandons an analysis of this
black female bitter ambivalence and its relation to male nation building. She
chooses, it seems, by default, the frontier model of citizenship in the second
section of the text and pushes “bitterness” to the unstable margins of the
text.
This is particularly evident in the chapter “Love,” in which Hurston
presents the gendered self as an “other” self who speaks and acts separately
from the “public” Zora. Although Zora, herself, sees no contradiction
between her career and her relationship with P.M.P., she attempts—in an
inverted performance of her mother—to smooth things out in “private” and
maintain her public career which is formulated as a desire for articulation,
for the externalization of the inner self that is denied her mother, Big Sweet,
and the Bahaman woman on the dock: “He begged me to give up my career,
marry him and live outside of New York City. I really wanted to do anything
he wanted me to do, but that one thing I could not do. . . . I had things
clawing inside of me that must be said” (208).
Throughout this chapter, Hurston articulates a femininity rarely
glimpsed in her writing, a femininity more akin to the women on the porch
at Eatonville and her mother’s own self-presentation. Hurston claims to
find attractive the extravagant masculinity of P.M.P. He tells her, in a pas-
sage that closely resembles Hurston’s father’s model of black masculinity, that
he does not want his wife to work, but to only live for him. Furthermore,
he and Hurston have a physical confrontation that results, not in Hurston’s
anger and rediscovery of self-definition and empowerment—as with the
stepmother—but in her admitting that it brings them closer together: love
makes her not her “self.” As Sidonie Smith argues, one strategic response of
the female autobiographer to dominant images of femininity is to masquer-
ade as the feminine, to perform an “overidentification with the ‘feminine.’”
According to Smith, “[s]elf-consciously adopted, the staging of masquerade
134 Keeping Up Her Geography

in women’s autobiographical practice might effectively undermine the stabil-

ity of any essentialist ‘truth’ of sexual difference” (46–47).
Here, however, I argue that Hurston’s claim to femininity, a “triumph
only a woman can understand,” operates to reveal the extent to which such
performativity is an essentialized part of “woman.” This is the moment in
the text at which a feminist articulation of location, of the ways in which the
frontier is inadequate to a public expression of the “inside meaning” of black
female subjects might present itself. Instead of a feminist articulation of the
fictiveness of white and black nation-making and a focus on the bitterness
that attends the prohibition to speak truth from within the forced fictiveness
of both white, male and female, and black masculine models of lying and
gender, Hurston naturalizes gender and reencloses both the bitterness and
ambivalence of the black female body within the narrative of “love.” When
she meets P.M.P. again, she is reassured, “ . . . I had a triumph that only a
woman could understand. He had not turned into a tramp in my absence,
but neither had he flamed like a newborn star in his profession. He confessed
that he needed my aggravating presence to push him” (211). Hurston refuses
to kiss and tell and closes the story of their relationship by insisting that their
relationship remain “private business” (211).
Throughout both sections of the text, Zora makes it clear that a pre-
supposition of women’s living is this smoothing over of the seams of the
disjuncture between public and private as it affects their ability to attain a
place within the frontier model of democracy. This is evident in Hurston’s
own autobiography, which is constructed of lies; and Hurston reveals more
of the dimensions of this “lying” in the “Love” chapter when she sharply
closes the door on the discussion of any politicization of the restraint she
experiences when she is with a man who resembles, in many ways, her father.
Furthermore, this smoothing over of the private in public is represented in
her portrait of her mother, and the few in-depth depictions of other women
that she presents in the text: the actress she works for, Fannie Hurst, and
Ethel Waters. What Hurston finds noteworthy about these women is their
dissemblance, their construction of themselves as public women, and in
each story Hurston reveals the “lie” behind their public representation of
themselves. The actress’s career and upwardly mobile marriage hide a family
life filled with trouble and the rejection of marriage to the man she desires;
Hurst escapes her position as a famous author and wife by playing house
with herself and running away; Waters performs in musicals that reflect none
of her own moral and religious beliefs. Each woman is represented as moody,
capricious, and unpredictable: all attributes associated with Hurston herself.
But Hurston shares with Waters another characteristic: her rejection of that
Bitter Locations 135

quality that most defines and divides Hurston from the male members of the
Harlem Renaissance and the mother on the dock: bitterness.
Hurston’s attempt to suppress her own “bitterness,” her hatred of the
emotion, suggests that it is bitterness combined with the woman’s gendered
position as mother that constructs her as extraneous to the male nation-mak-
ing. Although Hurston denies her bitterness, the emotion runs throughout
the text; she frequently seems bitter, and not merely against her stepmother,
or her brother, but against the race leaders of the North, some of the lead-
ers of the Harlem Renaissance, and numerous other bit players whom she
depicts with a less than flattering pen. Bitterness becomes a position of mar-
ginality: “I take no refuge from myself in bitterness. To me bitterness is the
under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of
defeat” (227). Hurston tells readers, “So I smile and not bitterly” (253). And
several pages later, Hurston reiterates, “I am not bitter” (261). Repetition
of her non-bitterness becomes a mantra against which others are measured;
however, its repetition is a testimony to the effect of suppressing bitterness,
rather than the dangers of bitterness itself. No where is this suppression more
visible than in two separate chapters: one, explicitly about race that was
edited for the manuscript, but remains essentially the same in both forms,
in its rejection of essentialism; the second, a chapter that was removed by
editors because of its questioning of U.S. politics on the eve of World War II
and its fervent anti-imperialist politics.
In these chapters, Hurston fails to acknowledge the uplift model of
nation-making that is most closely associated with a female model of citizen-
ship, the model that helps produce her as the public Zora Neale Hurston.
What is important about these chapters on race and imperialism, for my
purposes, however, is that you will not find a similar chapter on gender. If
Hurston seeks to define herself politically, it is in terms of race. Race is a
public term that has political resonance for Hurston, but female experience
is just that—personal experience that cannot be forwarded into the cultural
politics of the second section of the text: it remains private, enclosed within a
chapter on love that essentializes woman.
The first of these, the chapter of Dust Tracks that has probably been
most controversial, is “My People! My People!,” a chapter that attempts to
explain and resignify the meaning of this African-American phrase for a
white audience. Hurston’s deconstruction of race essentialism is narratively
constructed from the perspective of the white gaze. “My People, My People”
originally is explained as a social class phrase used in scorn. In Hurston’s
example, an educated black couple (from Barnard and Yale) use the phrase
to express their exasperation at two black men making a spectacle of
136 Keeping Up Her Geography

themselves on a train in the North: “Barnard and Yale sit there and dwindle
and dwindle. They do not look around the coach to see what is in the faces
of the white passengers. They know too well what is there . . . [they] are
thinking, ‘That’s just like a Negro.’ Not just like some Negroes, mind you,
No, like all” (236). It is the couple’s willful awareness of the essentialism and
racism of the white gaze that propels both the connection and the desire
for distance between the two pairs of African-Americans. This gaze becomes
institutionalized in the Jim Crow South where blacks are grouped together
within the train, regardless of their differences. So, Hurston makes it clear
that her purpose in deconstructing this phrase, and the racist essentialism
that propels its use, is to dismantle white assumptions that skin color and
character are related. But Hurston also makes it clear that the phrase has its
affectionate and ironic purposes within the black folk community: affirming
distance and connection at one and the same time, more positively in the
absence of the white gaze. It is a performative utterance that functions in
Hurston’s analysis much in the same way the “we the people” functions
in the Declaration of Independence: a phrase that creates and recreates its
constituency and the significance of that constituency through its enunciation.
Hurston is able to claim, “After all, the word ‘race’ is a loose classification
of physical characteristics. It tells nothing about the insides of people” (my
italics; 249). The phrase “my people, my people,” however, enunciates nation
through its inclusionary and exclusionary powers: “my people” cannot be
identified by skin color, but only as they speak and respond to the phrase
itself. This fictive nation-making owes its debt to the “lying sessions” of the
store porch that enunciate nation building through a collective imagining of
a past and present that creates itself outside of whiteness. Thus, Hurston ends
with a humorous folktale that explains blackness’s origins as an accident.
Hurston’s appropriation of black male discourse by telling black folk-
tales has been seen as a misappropriation. Yet, in effect, Hurston merely
demonstrates the power of black male lying to recreate racist exclusion and
discrimination as a tool for community building; she is able to both deny the
existence of the white man’s “Negro” and to pedagogically reconstruct race as
affiliation. This does not, however, as Hurston’s critics have indicated, address
racism; and, in fact, Hurston’s use of comic folklore may be said to pander to
white assumptions about African-Americans, because some of the tales may
be read as ridiculing African-Americans and in some instances re-essential-
izing race. Because although Hurston attempts to divorce race and character,
she also, then, goes on to define “my people, my people” through a set of
characteristics that have been used to stereotype African-Americans. When
Hurston appropriates black masculine lying for a white audience, then, she
Bitter Locations 137

does so in a way that is truly appropriative: she assumes the power of naming
and defining the Negro, even as she contends that no such thing exists.
Furthermore, Hurston continues in the chapter on imperialism,
“Seeing the World as It Is,” a chapter originally excised by the publishers,
to undermine the significance of race to a construction of political citizen-
ship, to being an American. Here she measures the distance between the folk
nation-building from the freedom of the store porch and the ability of such
a fiction to construct nationhood. This deconstruction of race challenges
the Anglo-Saxon to give up race, but it also articulates an individualism, an
Americanism, that reveals Hurston’s adherence to a frontier model of citizen-
ship, despite its inability to address the specificities of condition that create
inequality and exclusion.
First, Hurston dismisses the possibility of black nation-building,
because of the inability of the black American to create his own economic
system: “The only thing that keeps this from working is that it is impos-
sible to form a nation within a nation. He makes spurts and jerks at it, but
everyday he is forced away from it by necessity. He finds that he can neither
make money nor spend money in a restricted orbit. He is part of the national
economy” (252). This is a significant statement because it questions the
very foundations of Eatonville’s significance as a self-governing community
within a racist economic and political system. As Hurston tells readers in the
first section of the text, most of Eatonville depends economically on white
Maitland; almost everyone in Eatonville works in Maitland. This empha-
sizes more generally the economic interests that undermine and underpin
American democracy, particularly as it is practiced by Anglo-Saxons who
she describes as greedy and self-interested in their promotion of democracy
abroad; she challenges Roosevelt to practice democracy at home.
However, although many critics have seen this indictment of imperial-
ism as the most straightforward and condemnatory statement against U.S.
race politics at home and abroad—she states, for example, that slavery has
merely been moved further away and not abolished—Hurston also states
that this is the difference between practice and ideal, and that she refuses to
give up the desire for economic and social mobility that democracy “ideally”
offers. She does this in part to make it clear that she rejects communism, but
also to reiterate her own previous success and desire for continued economic
mobility: “It seems to me that the people who are enunciating these [com-
munist] principles are so saturated with European ideas that they miss the
whole point of America. . . . I am all for the idea of free vertical movement,
nothing horizontal” (263). Furthermore, although she sometimes seems to
reject both race and nation as forms of identification for the self, she does
138 Keeping Up Her Geography

so from within the metaphor of the frontier, so that she appears to represent
that very imperialism she criticizes: “I do not wish to close the frontiers of
life upon my own self. I do not wish to deny myself the expansion of indi-
vidual capabilities and depths by living in a space whose boundaries are race
and nation” (283). Samira Kawash argues that in this chapter, and particu-
larly in this passage, “that Hurston repudiates not only nationalism but race
consciousness, a truly risky practice for a black woman in the 1940s” (168).
However, by imagining the nation through the location of the frontier, Hur-
ston reimagines a black female subject without bitterness or the ambivalence
that structures black women’s inability to participate in the nation-making
of white and black models of citizenship. She privatizes gender and decon-
structs race in order to place herself in the position of American. Having
revealed the dissemblances of white female models of citizenship, and the
exclusions of black masculine models, she assumes the “ideal” of the white
granny, even if that ideal cannot be placed into practice.
There is, however, an implicit critique of gender and race as they inter-
sect in her body when she argues that “ I will fight for my country but I will
not lie for her” (261). This obvious reassumption of the frontier model of
masculinity that defines citizenship as the willingness to give up the body for
one’s country invokes that model of first class citizenship that has tradition-
ally been the responsibility of the male. Hurston, ironically, because of her
gender would not have been called upon to die for her country. So perhaps
she is making the claim that she better understands the meaning of sacrific-
ing the body for the state than the white “granny” does, slyly giving the lie
to his model of citizenship. But perhaps she is also saying that it is easier to
die for one’s country than to attempt the self-disclosure of desire and sub-
ordination that Big Sweet and the Bahaman mother represent—the kind of
embodiment that is rejected as untrustworthy, and, therefore, unworthy of
full citizenship. Thus, Hurston’s final claim becomes an intricate testimony
to the fictiveness of attempting to construct a model of black female nation-
hood through the frontier model of citizenship.

II. ANOTHER BITTER FRONTIER

Smedley’s novel, Daughter of Earth, is not an autobiography, but autobio-

graphical, releasing it from the accusations of “lying” directed at Hurston’s
text. The cover of fiction makes it possible for Smedley to articulate her story
within her own notion of truth, and it allows her to situate the story of her-
self within a cultural geography that is more able than the facts to repre-
sent the gendered politics of public and private within the United States.
Bitter Locations 139

For example, many of the events that occur in the second section of the text
actually occur in Europe, but Smedley places them in the U.S. to emphasize
the Americanness of her story. This allows Smedley to articulate the ways
in which the protagonist Marie Rogers’ story is an American story. In other
words, just as Hurston represents Eatonville as frontier to suit her own ver-
sion of truth, Smedley constructs a national geography for Marie that reflects
her own understanding of the relation between the frontier model of citizen-
ship and gender.
As Hurston does in Dust Tracks, Smedley’s Marie adopts the frontier
model of citizenship; and not surprisingly, critics have leveled similar com-
plaints of incoherence against Smedley’s novel. In fact, Walt Carmon, in an
early review in the New Masses, argued that the novel was a poor represen-
tative of proletarian fiction, “because it owes its bias to the bitterness of a
woman.”14 Here, we have a problem similar to the one that Hurston’s text
reveals: the bitter female body is seen as disruptive to masculine public forms
of political identification and nation-making. Whereas Hurston’s text increas-
ingly suppresses this female body in the second section of her text in order to
align herself with frontier nation-making, Smedley constantly defers coming
to terms with the female body and its constant violation in the text—so that
Marie’s rape becomes the central turning point in her abandonment of the
frontier model of citizenship.
Like Hurston, Smedley’s Marie sees her own propensity toward “wan-
dering” as a trait inherited from the father. And she eventually writes this
“wandering” tendency as a survival mechanism that propels her into her
professional life as a writer. Marie tells the reader, “Had it not been for the
wanderlust in my blood—my father’s gift to me—and I had not inherited
his refusal to accept my lot as ordained by a God I might have remained in
the [mining] towns all my life, married some working man. . . .” (123). And
yet, on both writers’ part there is the recognition that their “wanderings” are
not conducted under the same conditions of their fathers; both men may
be raced and classed subjects, but their wanderings are written as voluntary,
as being in service of their imaginings. But the conditions that propel both
women into mobility are directly connected to their father’s treatment of
them as subordinate female subjects.
Marie Rogers, like Hurston, defines her experience in relation to the
frontier. Although born in a small Missouri farming community, she is raised
in the western states of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Her father’s
obsession with adventure and his conviction that riches lie just beyond the
horizon keeps him on the move, and often, his family with him. Like Hur-
ston, Smedley is the second daughter, and one too many for her father who
140 Keeping Up Her Geography

ignores her once he has a son. However, gender in Smedley is constituted not
through the prohibitions of the father, but through fear of the father’s aban-
donment and a complex identification with the father’s freedom.
The frontier father comes and goes and moves his family at will, search-
ing for wealth and adventure. In this, he is different from the other members
of the farming community, who do not always believe the stories he tells of
his adventures: “my father’s imagination reached to a mysterious city called
St. Joseph on the Missouri River. But then he was a man with the soul and
imagination of a vagabond. People listened to his stories, filled with color
and adventure, but they did not always believe” (10). This is because Marie’s
father is part American Indian: “For he was not one of them; he was almost
a foreigner, in fact. His family was unknown to our world. They were not
farmers, and some said they were unsteady, unreliable—a shiftless crew; that
was the Indian blood in their veins. . . . you could never trust foreigners or
Indians” (10). So, he recreates the world through fiction to rewrite his sub-
ordinate position as one of power in much the same way as the men on the
Eatonville store porch.
Her father’s difference from the community—his foreignness—how-
ever, also makes him an object of desire, particularly to Marie: “[My mother]
was fallible but he was not. His word was enough for me—I obeyed. To be
like him, to drive horses as he drove them, to pitch hay as he pitched it, to
make him as proud of me as he was of my new baby brother George was
my one desire in life” (17). However, through his insistent wanderings, his
creation of his own identity through the discourse of frontier masculinity, he
destroys the stability that her mother desires and teaches Marie that the solu-
tion to unhappiness and failure is geographical: “ . . . our roots were torn
from the soil and we began a life of wandering, searching for success and
happiness and riches that always lay just beyond where we were not. Only
since then I have heard the old saying: ‘Where I am not, there is happiness’”
(35). The father’s attempt to establish himself outside the community that
sees him as foreign makes it clear that the basis of frontier masculinity is the
construction of oneself as “native” and, therefore, to identify oneself with
the heroic outlines of the West as a place of self-making. But, this self-mak-
ing—which involves turning the Indian into a symbol of white native-born
frontier masculinity—requires constant transience.
The father’s pursuit of frontier masculinity ensures the family’s con-
stant homelessness. What emerges from Smedley’s portrait of Marie’s life is
the absence of a public/private divide, if that divide depends on a notion of
the home, of domestic ideology in the way that it is interpreted in separate
spheres ideology. No such domesticity is imaginable here as the condition of
Bitter Locations 141

their migrancy and poverty ensures that no home can be constructed. The
Rogers live in the open air on the road, in a tent, and rarely do they all live
together. Nor is there a sense of privacy that is so necessary to the construc-
tion of domestic ideology. What is important here, as on the frontier of Polk
County, is the “law” of the job that negates any distinction between home
and work in its encroachment on the home. This becomes literally true when
a flood hits the Rogers’ tent, sweeping the home away and forcing the family
to seek shelter on the boss’s front porch, perched high on the hill. The Rogers
are not invited in. This sweeping away of the home, a product of economic
geography, exposes the Rogers to the social degradation of the boss and his
wife. But, whereas, it would seem to represent the father’s failure to secure
the domestic privacy upon which masculinity supposedly depends for its
legitimacy, John Rogers turns the destruction of their home into an occasion
for masculine mythmaking, retreating to the saloon to tell the story of “his
saving” of a bloated dead body from the muddy depths of the flood.
John Rogers’ desire to transform himself into an American is not
structured through his ability to provide a stable home for his wife and
children. What it means to be “American,” is thus not predicated on the
private as the domestic and the familial, but in terms of Rogers’ ability to
overcome the burden that his wife and children come to represent. Stripped
of the facade of domestic ideology, the public/private divide is constructed
only through masculine transcendence of the family as a social structure
that hinders rather than complements his efforts to express that “dominant
individualism” that Turner describes as constitutive of the male American
character.
Finally, her father stakes his claims to citizenship—to his American-
ness—through his allegiance to the economics of the state. When Marie
remembers the childhood landscape of the West, it is her father’s allegiance
to the “job”—and not his family—that she recalls. The transience of small
company mining towns dominates Smedley’s story, as the family follows
the “job” and her father’s mythic fantasies of masculine approbation.
Smedley depicts this frontier as self-interested, exclusionary, and domi-
nated by “a code” of behavior that her mother and father, the cowboys, and
other native-born Americans of the West attempt to live by. Smedley delves
deeply into the stories of these mining camps—not unlike the camps of
Florida in Polk County that Hurston describes—to articulate for women
the conflict between the ideals of frontier masculinity that her father repre-
sents and the concept of embodied citizenship, that form of citizenship that
might recognize the conditions of inequality that the white male granny
rejects and that Big Sweet and the Bahaman woman represent in Hurston.
142 Keeping Up Her Geography

As Hurston notes in her description of Polk County, the job itself is

the only “law” that functions on the frontier, and this is true, as well, in the
mining camps the Rogers live and work in. On the one hand, the camps rep-
resent the passing of that frontier masculinity represented by the ex-cowboys
who come to the camps in search of work. On the other hand, the camps
become a site for redefining American masculine character and realigning
the interests of native-born American men with the economic interests of
the state. The violent struggles between worker and company in the min-
ing camps reveal the extent to which the companies transcend both law and
nation; the companies issue their own “script,” and U.S. and state military
forces represent their interests by keeping order in the towns and camps.
Often, the native-born American men are mere spectators to the often vio-
lent struggles that occur between the immigrant miners, the companies, and
the U.S. forces brought in to protect the company’s interests. Marie’s father
and the native-born men who work with him remain embedded in a fron-
tier mythology which neither understands nor can incorporate the ethnic
and class struggle they observe: “As a native American himself, with hopes of
becoming an employer, [my father] tried to identify himself with the sheriff
and the officials of the camp against the strikers, who were foreigners. . . .”
(119–120). So, John Rogers establishes himself as a citizen through his eco-
nomic investment in individualism, and his interests become identical with
the public interests of the state. He is no longer a foreigner.
In short, whereas Marie’s childhood imaginings are mapped according
to her father’s individualistic imagining of the West as a backdrop for his
own fictions, Marie produces a map of the West that reflects her mother’s
awareness and her own belated political consciousness of how the compa-
nies have colonized the land of her father’s imaginings: “In all directions lay
the lands and the towns of the company, and to the north lay other towns
of other companies with conditions just the same” (102). Once again, the
fictions of western masculinity attempt to ignore the conditions that posi-
tion subjects differently in relation to the law—in particular Marie’s father
attempts to ignore his own “foreignness” (his Indianness) in order to recre-
ate himself within the codes of frontier masculinity. And Marie attempts to
arrange her own life according to this code, attempting to both appropriate it
and to avoid the code’s public exclusion of women.
This frontier code through which “foreign” men become representa-
tive Americans implicitly excludes women. And, as in Hurston’s text, wom-
en’s position in relation to nation-making is represented through the trope
of “bitterness.” The word is used repeatedly throughout the text; whereas
Hurston used the term to signify the black mother’s position, in Daughter
Bitter Locations 143

of Earth the term is most often associated with the condition of being both
female and poor within the United States. The articulation of women’s bit-
terness begins with Marie’s mother: “Her tears . . . they embittered my life!”
(my italics; 37). The bond Marie has with her mother is an inarticulate bond
of “bitterness,” created through work, poverty, and the family’s transience
in pursuit of the father’s desires. Marie comes to understand the cruelty of
her mother’s life, but she hopes to escape this “bitterness” through living the
wandering life represented by her father and the cowboys of the West. And,
as in Hurston’s text, this model depends on an acquired individualism that
seeks to negate the unequal realities of female embodiment.
However, according to Marie, there is a gendered code that applies
to working-women in the West, a code that offers some freedom for single
women. Marie defines this code as “a woman who earned her own money
was a free woman. Only married women had to take orders” (78). And yet
this code repeatedly fails to protect the autonomy of the Rogers women.
John Rogers violates this code when he attempts to prevent his daughter
Annie, who works in the laundry, from attending dance halls. He treats
Helen, his sister-in-law, with more respect than his wife, because she helps
support the family. But, later, he throws Helen out of the house when it
is revealed that she has been earning money to support the family through
prostitution. Helen argues that it is John Rogers’ refusal to support his fam-
ily that has made her a prostitute, and Marie’s mother supports her sister
against her husband. However, Helen agrees to leave “his” house when he
threatens to destroy the house itself if she stays (83). Marie learns from these
episodes that economic independence can provide women with respect and
autonomy, but the father is able to challenge their sexual autonomy. Despite
the code that supposedly protects the independent woman’s autonomy, both
Helen and Annie can be dismissed from John Rogers’ house because of their
sexuality. This episode is also instrumental for what I understand as Marie’s
misapprehension of how women’s sexual and economic subordination are
mutually constitutive.
This misapprehension is revealed in Marie’s discussion of her admira-
tion for Helen. Marie focuses on the issue of marriage versus prostitution
and the supposed freedom from male domination and maternal responsibil-
ity that Helen acquires as a prostitute:

To me her profession seemed as honorable as that of any married

woman—she made her living in the same way that they made theirs,
except that she made a better living and had more rights over her body
and soul. . . . She was pledged to obey no man. By such things I
144 Keeping Up Her Geography

judged decency and self-respect, and such a life seemed preferable to

marriage. (142)

In this passage, sexual freedom, individualism, and economic independence

are aligned with one another.
However, Helen, as with Big Sweet, cannot be said to be representative
of the frontier model of citizenship, since she, unlike John Rogers, is forced
to choose between her own desires and the needs of the family. Helen is no
more free than Marie’s mother, and, in fact, her sacrifice for her sister and
her sister’s family precludes her own desires; she prostitutes herself for her
sister and her sister’s children. She must give up her proposed marriage to
her lover Sam, because she fears he will use her past against her once she is
no longer economically independent. Sam marries Annie, and when Annie
dies, Helen attempts to raise Sam and Annie’s child, only to have Sam claim
she is unfit and retrieve the baby: “The baby that now lay against her bosom
seemed almost like the fulfillment of a desire that had long been dead. She
would keep it with her, and she exulted when she thought of it. The Helens
of the world are said to be hard and without a desire for children. The Helen
who was my aunt was not” (142). Most readers do not focus on this passage,
but on the first passage in which Marie compares marriage to prostitution.
However, the articulation of Helen’s desire as opposed to the obligations
she assumes for her sister’s family places her in a parallel position to Marie’s
mother, rather than in an alternative position. It also parallels the position of
Big Sweet, inasmuch as Marie attempts to articulate Helen’s sexual and eco-
nomic subordination, and the unnamed desires that prevent her lawlessness
from being a symbol of freedom and power.
Similarly, if Helen’s economic and sexual freedom excludes her from
the family, even as she works to support it, the political equality offered
by suffrage may be made useless by the “codes” of gender that transform
Marie’s mother’s economic subordination in the household into political
subordination. When women in Colorado get the vote, Marie’s mother
attempts to assert her political independence by not telling her husband how
she voted, “At last a weapon had been put into her hands. At least she felt it
so. He threatened her, but still she would not answer . . .”(86). The mother’s
exercise of her political right is doomed by her economic subordination; her
violation of the “code” leaves John Rogers free to abandon his family once
again. After months of attempting to feed her children and herself alone, she
falls ill and John Rogers returns—after she reveals how she voted. Marie’s
mother attempts to lay claim to the kind of public/private self exhibited by
her husband when she exercises her suffrage, aligning herself with the political
Bitter Locations 145

interests of the state. Instead, her experience reveals the interrelatedness of

her gendered economic and political subordination.
Thus, marriage and prostitution are parallel in the limitations that they
place on women’s citizenship. Inasmuch as both Helen and Marie’s mother
must relinquish self-interest in service of the family and/or the male cus-
tomer, they reveal the laws contradictory limits when it seeks to privatize
women’s body within the discourse of the family—through the male wage,
through its ignorance of domestic violence, through its denial of reproduc-
tive/sexual freedom the mother’s ability to exercise economic and political
rights disappears. Helen, on the other hand, comes to represent the female
body as sexuality; when women transcend the “natural” institution of the
family that ensures masculinity’s participation in the state as an “equal,” they
become not like men citizens, but as we have seen with Big Sweet, they come
to represent women’s difference, their unsuitability to participate in both the
domestic sphere upon which the presumption of masculine citizenship oper-
ates and in the public sphere, because their prostitution introduces sexuality
and the body into the politics of the state, that which the “private” sphere has
been created and designed to conceal.
It is not surprising then that Marie seeks to define herself in mascu-
line terms. In a 1924 letter to her friend Florence Lennon, Smedley makes
explicit the relationship between western constructions of gender and her
own, and Marie’s, decision to reject family obligations and love:

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of
physical force, was dominant. Women were desired, of course, but the
rough-and-ready woman made her place. . . . Now, being a girl I was
ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man. I
shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys. I didn’t
like it, but it was the proper thing to do. So I forced myself into it, I
scorned all weak womanly things. Like all my family and class, I consid-
ered it a sign of weakness to show affection. . . . (qtd. in MacKinnon
and MacKinnon 94–5)

Similarly, in the novel, Marie claims, “ . . . in our world no one was sup-
posed to show affection or pain. Only weaklings and women did that” (90).
When her mother dies, she rejects becoming caretaker to her father and
brothers and embarks on an independent life. And she explicitly sees this
rejection of them as an attempt to avoid being a woman.
As Smedley moves throughout the West, she continuously identi-
fies with the masculine characteristics of her father and men, such as the
146 Keeping Up Her Geography

ex-cowboy Big Buck who helps finance her schooling. And she chooses a
life that she clearly defines as opposed to the “[l]ove, tenderness, and duty
[that] belonged to women and to weaklings in general” (142). Big Buck
becomes a substitute father, not unlike the white male granny of Hurston’s
narrative, and tutors her in the ways of being a man: “Big Buck had tried
to blast out of me everything feminine. That I belonged to the female per-
suasion never induced him to show any leniency, and he showed me on
more than one occasion that I had to face the consequences of my acts
every bit as much as a man” (162). In this way, Marie defines herself within
the paradigm of frontier masculinity and attempts to make a living at the
male occupation of traveling salesman, which requires her to travel from
city to city throughout the West.
However, wherever Marie goes she is understood not as an independent
worker/citizen, but as a prostitute, as a woman. Marie’s attempt to live a mas-
culine life on the frontier excludes her from both the category of “woman”
and the category of “man.” Her body ensures that she does not have the free-
dom of masculinity on the frontier and her pursuit of a masculine way of life
excludes her from any women’s community. On the one hand, she discovers
that her independence is understood as sexual autonomy and not economic
independence, and other women exclude her because of this. On the other
hand, this sexual understanding of the “free woman” is what makes her a
woman in the eyes of men. Marie becomes particularly embittered against
the “private home” and its representative, the middle-class woman, in this
section of the text. When she first goes on the road selling magazine tran-
scriptions, she goes to “private homes.” But the women in these “neat, smug
homes” meet her with suspicion and even “personal animosity” (151–152).
And, this is seen not merely as a class issue, but a gendered one, because she
tells readers that she begins to go to businesses “where I would meet only
men” (152). Marie predicates her self-making as masculine, not merely to
escape the bitterness of her mother’s life, but because she is excluded from
that domesticity that signifies gender identification in the dominant ideol-
ogy of public and private and is the imagined foundation of elite women’s
social citizenship.
And yet, if the public/private divide is maintained through the differ-
entiation of women’s bodies from men’s, then Marie cannot so easily escape
female embodiment. This becomes clear when a set of confusions about
women’s identity results in the rape of a middle-class woman who occupies
the hall across from Marie at the hotel in a small western frontier town.
The woman is raped, “because” she is mistaken for Marie, and the men—a
bartender at the hotel and his friends—go in search of Marie because they
Bitter Locations 147

believe she is a prostitute. When the bartender discovers that she is not but
is a virgin, he seeks to nurse the sick and starving Marie back to health as a
sign of his remorse. Finally, he proposes to her. Marie’s unviolated, nonsexual
body acts as a kind of gendered shelter in this episode; and, since the middle-
class woman disappears from the story (she is never mentioned once a brief
story of the assault is told), Marie’s nonviolation, and her disgust at the value
placed upon her virginity, acts as a kind of textual deferment of the violation
of the female body; it is almost as if no violation has occurred at all. And so,
Marie is able to return to her life on the road. Yet this confusion of identity
reveals the extent to which Marie must recuperate her body—attest to her
virginity, her innocence—as an asexual body in order to enact the frontier
model of citizenship.
Marie learns a similar lesson about female embodiment from her first
failed marriage to a Danish intellectual and socialist. When they attempt to
have a marriage of equality, Marie’s fear and rejection of dependency and
motherhood, of weak and womanly things, seems unimportant. However,
two illegal abortions later, Marie leaves the marriage because they represent
an ever widening gap between husband and wife and between Marie’s desire
for financial independence and the costly reality of being female. Marie pays
for both abortions with her earnings just as she had paid for her share of
the marriage license, as if a strict accounting of her financial independence
can reestablish her autonomy and equality with her husband. Instead, the
abortions reveal his inability to understand Marie’s bitterness and ambiva-
lence and his ignorance of her physical pain. Despite, then, her ability to
physically avoid motherhood and to financially avoid dependence, she finds
herself in the position of “woman.” Finally she divorces her husband after the
second abortion, because as they are traveling home on the street car Marie
is in so much pain that she cannot sit up and he yells at her, “‘Sit up! People
are looking at you—do you want to make a scene in public?’” (217). Marie’s
inability to control her body in public in this scene is in direct contradiction
to the frontier-based masculine codes by which she has lived. Her body pub-
licly betrays her status as “wife.” Moreover, her husband understands Marie’s
pain, not as the violation of her body, but as Marie’s violation of the spatial
division of public and private. Marie’s divorce temporarily helps her regain
her independence, but it does not solve, as the last section of the text makes
clear, the problem of the female body’s violation being seen as the female
body violating the boundaries of public and private and threatening mascu-
line constructions of the public as dependent on disembodiment.
After her divorce, Marie moves east to New York. The move east, how-
ever, is more than geographical, because moving east will also become a new
148 Keeping Up Her Geography

way of defining herself in relation to America and the frontier model of citi-
zenship. In New York, Marie, who has always felt like an “individual,” begins
to feel “ignorant, insignificant, unimportant” (234). In part this feeling
about herself is caused by her immersion in the educated culture to which
her friend and ex-sister-in-law Karin introduces her. But, more significantly,
Marie begins to feel like a “girl” again, and this section reads as a (re)coming-
of-age narrative, in which Marie attempts to reconstruct herself in those gen-
dered roles that she has left behind—the familial roles of daughter, sister,
and wife—by constructing for herself a political family of men. In her mind,
their family will be based on political coalition and shared responsibility as
equals, a family that does not require her to relinquish her personal desires
for self-fulfillment, because the personal and political are aligned. But Marie
must first relearn to interpret her experience from the perspective of her new
political family.
Marie’s transition into an inexperienced “girl” is most marked in her rela-
tionship with her teacher Sardar Ranjit Singh and the other men of the Indian
National Movement. Through her friendship with Singh, Marie becomes not
only a student of Indian history, but becomes committed to the political move-
ment to free India from British colonialism. She begins to see herself as having
lived merely a purely physical life of reaction and impulse, and her new ana-
lytical and abstract studies negate her female experience as insignificant rather
than as constitutive of what has led her to the movement. Smedley, however,
is explicit about Marie’s desire to bond love and politics through the reconsti-
tuted family of father and brothers who make up the all-male—as depicted
in the novel—movement. The men of the movement and her responsibility
to them, rather than to it, represents the fulfillment of her failure to meet her
responsibilities as daughter and sister to her father and brothers:

To me the Indians became a symbol of my duty and responsibility. They

took the place of my father, of my brother, who was dead, and the brother
whose destiny I was as yet uncertain. . . . I recalled that once I had
deserted my little brothers who needed my help and protection. I had
been selfish and in my drive to save myself had sacrificed them. (287).

But Marie’s difference—as an American white woman—is crucial to under-

standing how and why this attempt to recreate herself as sister within a national
political movement fails on several levels.
The issue of Marie’s status as an American white woman first arises in
a discussion with Singh. Singh tells her, “‘You are very American and you
have a cheap and superficial view of life—the idea of profit’” (273). This
Bitter Locations 149

argument attempts to situate Marie within a national identity, but Marie

tries to reject it as an argument based on Singh’s high caste status. She argues
that only those who have never starved can imagine working without hope
of reward. The two argue over class and nation and the difference between
Singh’s “patriotism” and Marie’s rejection of American nationalism. At this
point, Marie explicitly rejects nationalism, not because of her experience
of gender subordination, but because she has acquired an internationalist-
socialist position during her marriage. Thus, she understands nationalism as
in opposition to class-based struggle. Singh, however, does not accept the
class-based analysis that Marie offers in place of patriotism; he loves India
and does not understand Marie’s alienation from her homeland.
Singh also tells her, “‘I often hope that women, also, will work for free-
dom for all people. They should know, like the working class, and like all
Asia, what subjection means. But I fear. . . . ’” Marie interrupts, “‘Oh, I
don’t think women have a vision broader than men! It all depends upon the
individual and the class they come from’” (275). This is indicative of Marie’s
increasing desire to connect her commitment to the freedom of India with
her socialist commitments. For Marie, anti-imperialism becomes a necessary
foundation for an international socialist politics, even though Singh rejects
socialist interference as imperialist, and U.S. socialists define the Indian
movement as nationalist. Singh appears to offer Marie an opportunity to
articulate feminism’s place with socialism and anti-imperialism, despite the
“fear” that Marie doesn’t give him an opportunity to name, she rejects any
articulation dependent on “women” as a class. At this point in the novel, it
appears that Marie rejects feminism and understands her gendered experi-
ence in terms of class.
The result of these arguments is to put Marie in her place, not merely
as a student and an outsider, but to deny that her experience of class and
gender oppression is significant to political and intellectual articulation: “To
him, I was a raw impulsive, inexperienced girl” (277). Here, we can see that
Marie’s rejection of feminism as a political lens through which to articulate
her experience makes that experience itself negligible in the new political
family of men that she has adopted as her own. Her new political family
teaches her to subordinate herself to masculine authority in a way that the
traditional family could not.
Increasingly, Marie begins to subordinate gender politics to those of
nation and class. And, in fact, despite her mother’s experience of the West
and her own failed ability to live out the masculine frontier model of citizen-
ship, she increasingly relies on this model to understand the national politics
of citizenship. This tendency to subordinate her experience of gender to the
150 Keeping Up Her Geography

mythology of western individualism can be seen earlier in the text when she
reflects back on her experiences: “I recall now the years of my girlhood and
youth amongst the men of the far West—unlettered rough working-men
who had traveled the worst of life: and with but one exception and—that of
a barber in a small town—I had never suffered insult and not one man had
tried to lay a hand on me in violence” (125). Marie misremembers her gen-
dered experience of the West—most significantly ignoring the earlier rape of
the middle-class woman at the hotel.
Moreover, whereas Marie within the first section of the text associates
bitterness with the tears of women, in this section of the text, she denies that
connection: “I thought I had known what bitterness was, but when with [the
Indian revolutionaries] I realized that I did not know the meaning of the
word” (272). As Marie comes to perceive herself as a political subject, she
also comes to distance herself from her female experience of the West; those
experiences are no longer seen as political—her abortions, her marriages, the
attempted rapes, her position as daughter. In fact, if she once experienced her
avoidance of the female position of wife, mother, daughter, and sister as a
necessity of personal and political independence, she now claims the position
of “bahin—sister” as a form of atonement for her earlier selfishness in aban-
doning her father and brothers after her mother’s death. In this reconfigura-
tion of self, her brothers, father, and the model of citizenship represented
by the frontier come to represent the “real” America that has been betrayed
by an eastern establishment that colludes with the British against its own
people.
The question of Marie’s national identity becomes part of the thematic
of the last section of the text. Her friends in the socialist movement and those
women working for the birth control movement question her devotion to a
movement that prioritizes neither international class struggle nor women’s
rights. Others question whether Marie’s interest is motivated by some love
affair with one of the men or an erotic interest in Indian men in general. Fur-
thermore, when she is arrested and interrogated, her status as an American
and as a white woman is directly invoked both by the detectives and later in
the press. Marie develops several responses to the question of both her gen-
der and national identity and their relation to her work with the movement.
What does it mean to be an American and to work within a nationalist
framework for a woman who has primarily seen herself as gendered and classed
subject? Marie has several responses. The first of these is, as in her response
to Singh, to locate the Indian movement within a socialist context and to
argue that Asia’s freedom from colonial rule is central to an international
socialist movement, and therefore, is not merely a nationalist movement: “I
Bitter Locations 151

have no country . . . my countrymen are the men and women who work
against oppression—it does not matter who or where they are. With them I
feel at home—we understand each other. Others are foreign to me” (355). In
another response, Marie more problematically attempts to re-cover another
nationalist impulse in the western ideals of men such as Big Buck: “ . . . I
felt that I was molding the native earth of America. In working with them
I realized how American I was, how native of my soil, and how I could
appeal to principles, traditions and ideas of the American people, when they
could make but an intellectual appeal” (359). She represents the lawyer who
attempts to help her when she is freed from prison within this same ideal.
He is, according to Marie, “a type of man that if fast disappearing—a man of
the West who fought for the traditions of the days when America was young
and believed in freedom for all men . . . a man holding the fort, hoping
a new generation would arise, filled with the spirit of the days when he was
young—and when America was young” (335–6).
Most of these responses and much of Marie’s devotion to the movement
originates from her imprisonment for helping aid the movement. Before her
imprisonment, as an American, she uses her publishing connections to help
her friends publish a book, helps another leave the country, and agrees to
hide and keep a list of members in her home, but she does not become a part
of the political body until after her imprisonment. Prior to Marie’s arrest, she
is raped by a member of the movement, Juan Diaz, and nearly commits sui-
cide, but these events are marginalized precisely because Marie goes to prison
and undergoes the interrogation of U.S. and British authorities. Diaz is later
revealed as a traitor—a British spy, who is probably responsible for her arrest.
But Marie’s imprisonment after she returns from the hospital—after a failed
suicide attempt that is only blurrily narrated and never named as such—
encourages readers and Marie, herself, to repress the rape and its emotional
and political implications. Throughout her imprisonment, Marie must focus
instead on her obligation to remain silent about her knowledge of and con-
nections to the men. Therefore, this scene seems to repeat the scene at the
hotel, when the middle-class woman is raped and forgotten; once again the
violation of the female body is marginalized, as Marie tries to transform the
familial identity of “sister” into a form of agency representing her loyalty to
the politics of masculine nation building.
However, if Marie goes to prison as “sister,” she will exit the movement
as “foreigner,” “wife,” and a bitter woman. Eventually the rape and Marie’s
imprisonment are revealed as connected, when Marie’s rapist is revealed as
also a political traitor. After her release from prison, Marie devotes herself
to the movement, and, while participating in a conference, meets one of its
152 Keeping Up Her Geography

leaders, Anand Mankevar, and marries him. But a short time later, at another
conference, after she and Juan Diaz have a political dispute in which many
of the men including her husband take her side, Diaz reveals their “affair”
to others. He claims that she opposes him only because he would not marry
her and that she is a woman of “loose character.” Furthermore, he calls her a
foreigner, a woman, and a wife who has no right to participate in the move-
ment. It is of course this blending of characteristics—both fact and fiction—
that gives his claims a hearing within the movement. She is a “foreigner”
and has become a “wife.” More importantly, however, she has previously lied
to Anand, telling him that she has not slept with any of his countrymen.
This is important to Anand, he claims, because if she has had sex with other
Indians it will undermine his political work. People will lose respect for him,
because he has married a woman whose interest in the movement appears to
be purely her sexual interest in Indian men.
However, even before Juan Diaz makes his claims, Anand and Marie
are divided over issues of sexuality, specifically her sexual past. And Anand
has become obsessed with Marie’s sexual past. During this time, “We were
in a restaurant, but suddenly I wept with unrestrained bitterness and misery.
It was a scandal, and with a white, drawn face he paid the bill and we left”
(381). This scene is similar to the earlier post-abortion scene between Marie
and her first husband. Marie’s violated body once again is seen as violating
public and private—creating “a scandal.” The rape and its aftermath rupture
the careful negotiation of public and private, of politics and the body, to
which Marie has committed herself.
This scene precipitates Diaz’s semi-public utterance of his version of
the rape. And Marie is prevented by Anand from publicly speaking the truth.
Preferring to be blackmailed by Juan Diaz, he tells her that the men in the
movement will not believe a woman over a man, even though many of the
men have sided with Marie in the past. In any event, Anand sees his politi-
cal work threatened and blames Marie, forbidding her from speaking even
after Diaz has been uncovered as a British spy. Marie tells readers, “ I wished
to stand on a housetop and tell the truth as it was, instead of being caught
in a trap like this. And acid bitterness ate into me; to think that a miser-
able sex story was causing such misery. . . .” (399). And what condemns her
in Anand’s eyes is her original silence about the rape, a silence maintained
not only because she fears that it will destroy the national movement but
because of her inability to articulate what has happened to her. So her expe-
rience becomes constituted as a lie in multiple ways: Diaz claims that she
was not raped; her silence about her experience with Diaz makes her a liar
to her husband; and her involvement with the Indian national movement is
Bitter Locations 153

no longer seen as politically motivated, but motivated by her sexual interest

in Indian men.
More problematically, Marie never clearly defines what occurs as rape.
Nor do the other characters—Diaz, Marie’s husband, or the other men in
the movement. So, it is not certain what truth Marie would speak from the
rooftop, because at the center of Marie’s silence is an internal confusion
about what has occurred. Although the scene is written as rape, later Marie
seems to believe Juan Diaz’s interpretation of events. He tells her, “‘You
have no right to be so bitter . . . to try to make me responsible for all
this. . . . You asked me to stay. . . . And your fight against me was a
bit of a sham’” (296). Marie reflects back later,

Now, with distance lying between me and that night, I see that this
thing could never have happened without either my conscious or my
unconscious consent; that had there been no unconscious response in
me to the masculinity in him, he would have left my room as calmly as
he came. . . . I was too dishonest to admit that I was even a passive
participant. (297)

This belated understanding is itself fraught with confusion of oxymoronic

terms that need explanation and that once again focus on her own inability to
articulate why accepting responsibility for the rape—because of her “uncon-
scious consent”?—should be equated with her refusal to accept responsibil-
ity, more generally, for her sexual desire. Passivity comes to be understood
as a form of agency, and Marie seeks refuge in the rhetoric of the Freudian
unconscious to erase her own victimization. Attempting to avoid the “bit-
ter” position of female embodiment and her assert her own power, Marie
digs deeper into her own sexual pathology and effectively shuts down the
possibility of recognizing how her experience directly represents the systemic
oppression against which she is fighting and, in itself, reveals how sexism
undoes her political agency and the promise of full citizenship that she sees
in socialism and anti-imperialism.
What Marie appears to learn from the political framework that is placed
upon her story is that the failure to police her own “unconscious responses”
brings about political “injustice” for men (297). If Juan Diaz is a traitor to
the Indian National movement, then Marie’s body is no less so, producing
as it does the “miserable sex story.” Diaz’s presentation of her as a “loose”
woman effectively destroys both her marriage to Anand and her work, thus
succeeding in establishing the danger that women, but particularly white
American women, represent when they are allowed political participation in
154 Keeping Up Her Geography

the construction of nation-making. Just as Marie betrays her responsibili-

ties to her own father and brothers, who represent a “true” American fron-
tier nationalism, to pursue an intellectually and economically independent
life, so too does she betray her brothers in the Indian National movement
through her “unconscious responses” to masculinity.
Returning to our discussion of the public/private binary in Hur-
ston—the scene with her stepmother in which she writes her exclusion from
the family as empowerment, her love affair and the rhetoric of privacy that
she uses to exclude questions about the transformation of her self into a
woman who accepts violence—I think that this episode in Smedley shares
many resemblances with Hurston’s own rhetoric. Foremost here, in their
attempt to present themselves as national subjects is their transformation
of victimization into a discourse that rejects complaint and relies, respec-
tively, on the discourse of “love” and the discourse of the “unconscious” to
reject any notion that they are incapable of protecting themselves. This is
apparent in both scenes of violence, when Marie claims that she must have
“unconsciously” wanted Diaz, because she is physically capable of over-
powering him and similarly, Hurston emphasizes her own physical power
when she tells readers “that she gave as good as she got.” Both women, of
course, eventually abandon their relationships, but Smedley is able, in a way
that Hurston is not, to make a connection between the private home and
the political project of nationalism. By resituating European events in the
United States, Smedley more clearly rejects her earlier attempts to imagine
the original masculine model of the frontier as a model for women’s citi-
zenship. Thus, when Marie leaves her husband, she also leaves the United
States and the Free India Movement.
Both Hurston and Smedley indicate the extent to which gender may
be a marginalized context for the subject who attempts to articulate her
position within the nation. And both authors indicate how that marginal-
ization may occur—through the rendering of the female body as both bit-
ter and untrustworthy, whether the female writer marginalizes that bitter
body through the appropriation of a frontier individualism or through the
abandonment of a national politics. Both authors reject the social citizen-
ship model defined by middle-class women at the Representative Congress,
because even as it provides the means through which to achieve suffrage it
negates that suffrage by marginalizing the economically dependent woman
whose vote, like Smedley’s mother’s must go with the husband’s and the
women who, though, economically independent become the object of
nation-making rather than its subject, because they have no means to
argue their complaints within a construction of citizenship that mistakes
Bitter Locations 155

subordination and violation for authentic difference or an untrustworthy

bitterness likely to undermine with tales of sexual violation or economic
subordination the lies of nation-making.
In feminist theory today, we can see the legacy of Smedley and Hurston’s
struggle with the models of citizenship available to them in feminist debates
over the representation of female experience, particularly women’s experi-
ence of violence. Although the women’s movement of the seventies made
the “personal is political” its slogan, Carine M. Mardorossian argues that our
current polarization of victimization and agency tends support the dominant
hegemony of earlier eras, making “women’s psyche the site of analysis.” She
argues that this is a “depoliticizing gesture [for] feminist politics” (756). And
it is one that, like Hurston and Smedley, gives into the assumption that vic-
timization, inequality, and subordination are still signs of unworthiness for
citizenship, revealing the female subject’s lack of self-mastery. Moreover, in
revising or reinterpreting their traumatic experiences as scenes of agency and
empowerment to present themselves as worthy representative citizen sub-
jects, the authors’ private “psychologizing fictions of individualism” have not
achieved the desired effect (756).
Hurston’s and Smedley’s attempts to write themselves as representative
Americans, to present their private selves as aligned with the public models of
citizenship available to them, ultimately fail at several levels. Their texts have
been criticized as incoherent and untruthful. Yet they only uncover the flaws
of the models of citizenship available to them and the importance of not only
critiquing those models, but the necessity of reorganizing the public/private
divide, so that female embodiment—and the difference that race, class, and
sexuality makes to such embodiment—does not have to be marginalized in
order for women to lay claim to public representativeness.
Conclusion

As I have argued, feminist political theorists and feminist geographers’ analy-

sis of the public/private divide has taken an approach that encompasses the
history of separate spheres, but is not confined to the study or critique of
separate spheres in the nineteenth century. And, as I argue in chapter one, it
is important to recognize that this recent feminist critique is part of a much
longer history of women’s struggle to redefine the relation between public
and private realms. Contemporary gender relations cannot be understood,
critiqued, or reconfigured unless we understand the complex workings of
“guiding fictions” and “metaphors” of the public/private divide in political,
social, and private life, and how they have produced effects that are both
constitutive of reality and a mystification of it. The successes and failures
of the arguments of speakers at the Congress of Representative Women, of
middle-class female urban reformers, and writers such as Glasgow, Hurston,
and Smedley provide us with the historical context that helps us approach
contemporary theorizations of gender with an eye to the complexity of the
public/private and women’s challenge to this divide.
To further examine some of the implications of these challenges, the
implications of recognizing the long history of the feminist public/private
critique, I want to return to Davidson and Hatcher’s influential introductory
essay in No More Separate Spheres!. One of the lessons to be learned from fem-
inist challenges to the public/private divide is that Davidson and Hatcher’s
analysis of separate spheres is incomplete, because they fail to see that sepa-
rate spheres is useful politically. Examining separate spheres through the lens
of the home/work divide, they omit the significant category of the political,
and feminism as a primarily political project. Therefore, their representation
of contemporary gender relations seems overly simplistic, precisely because
they do not challenge dominant U.S. ideologies of the public/private divide
and the assumptions that originate with these ideologies, assumptions about

157
158 Keeping Up Her Geography

gender, race, class, citizenship, and the individual that have been examined
here.
This inattentiveness to the complexity of gender inequality is manifest
in an example that the authors provide in the “pedagogical aims” section of
their essay:

Separate spheres feminism, we suggest, has potential to foster anxiety

for students who—at least in part thanks to the gains made by women’s
movements—grew up in a world where spheres could be characterized
by a fluidity seemingly at odds with generalizations about women’s or
men’s worlds, behavior, character, aptitude, or other attributes. However,
at the same time that experience might be fluid (i.e. , mothers who are
full-time CEOS), the rhetoric most readily available often remains as
static and bifurcated as the separate spheres. (Classroom moments in
which a student says, “Women are more emotional and nurturing than
men’ are as common as the moments when a student says, ‘I’m not a
feminist, . . .” ). What is helpful about the separate spheres debate—and
the literature that tackles these issues—is that it offers a different model
for discussing feminism, one that attends to fluidity, contradiction, and
uneven developments. (22)

In this example, the authors conflate separate spheres with essentialist notions
of gender. Davidson and Hatcher seem to feel that a student’s statement that
“ ‘women are more emotional and nurturing than men’” derives from sepa-
rate spheres criticism and that a more “fluid” model of gender relations, artic-
ulated by a “bright” student, would more accurately reflect contemporary
and historical structures of gender (21). This critique then is not a historical
argument against the notion of separate spheres ideology per se, but against
essentialist notions of gender, and, as the authors admit, less about “debate”
than an “admonition” directed against essentialist representations of gender.
But the “mother who is also a CEO” example is as much about ideology and
our particular moment in U.S. history as is separate spheres ideology of the
nineteenth century and the critical perspective of feminists in the 1960s, 70s,
and 80s who relied on this paradigm. (The example evokes the rhetoric of
postfeminism, although Davidson and Hatcher carefully avoid the term.)
First, the description of contemporary gender experience as fluid is just
as historically inaccurate—if by accuracy one means representative—as those
who would describe separate spheres ideology as “what actually happened” in
the nineteenth-century United States. CEO mothers are even more unrepre-
sentative of contemporary women than were white middle-class women in
Conclusion 159

the nineteenth century. Second, the metaphor of “fluidity” seems to create

another binary, a binary structured around the suspect notion of “uneven
development”—which suggests that the student who does not experience
gender as fluidity is anachronistic. The metaphor of fluidity has been an
extremely popular one for those who do postmodern studies and, in fact, is
a metaphor that calls to my mind the “fluidity” of capital, the language of
globalization, and the mobility of the individual, key metaphors in U.S. cul-
ture’s conception of itself; to me, it has always been a suspect term, because
it seems borrowed from the ever expanding rhetoric of corporate America.
(And women’s “fluidity”—termed “adaptability” by reformist Clara Laugh-
lin—is hardly a new concept.)
Their example of the CEO/mother merely replaces the white mid-
dle-class homemaker of the nineteenth century with an example as privi-
leged, an example ideologically wed to late twentieth-century U.S. culture’s
focus on individual success narratives. If separate spheres ideology portrays
women as existing in the private, domestic realm and men in the realm
of work, post-separate spheres criticism represents feminist success—or
the gendered experience of fluidity—through the image of the working
mother. But just as separate spheres ideology cloaked all women in a dis-
course that privileged white middle-class women, so too does Davidson
and Hatcher’s image depend on a similar sleight-of-hand in which class
and race privilege quietly marginalizes other women’s less than fluid experi-
ences of the home/work dichotomy. Given the historical reality of women’s
work as a necessity and their inequality in the workforce, the authors can-
not merely use any working mother to represent gender fluidity, they must
use a CEO—a completely nonrepresentative figure for most U.S. citizens,
but particularly for female citizens. The example must be appropriately
privileged within the privatizing lexicon of American cultural definitions
of successful individualism.
What is not transformed in this example is the public/private structure
that produces such apolitical individualism as an example. This example does
not transform the meanings of the “individual” or of “success” as defined in
dominant American ideologies. In contrast, the speakers at the Congress of
Representative Women indicate the extent to which the relation between the
individual, the social, and the political must be renegotiated to accomplish a
feminist redefinition of citizenship, instead of merely entering into a domi-
nant configuration of citizenship built on the exclusion of women and the
assumption of women’s inequality. Their oppositional position to dominant
masculine ideologies of the public/private divide attempts not merely to have
women share men’s place in the structure of civilization, but to transform that
160 Keeping Up Her Geography

structure. Similarly, the urban reformers demonstrate the necessity of seeing

that overcoming the home/work dichotomy cannot be accomplished by a
simple substitution of the mother/CEO for the middle-class homemaker. In
their study of the working-girl, they demonstrate the mutual constitution of
home and work. Examining this mutuality through the unprivileged work-
ing woman, these authors demonstrate the necessity of rethinking how home
and work are implicated in one another from a feminist perspective that rec-
ognizes that worker/mother is not an experience of fluidity, but of conflict
and inequality. Within the context of this oppressive mutuality of home and
work, the parlor becomes symbolic of women’s desire to escape public and
private inequalities.
Finally, Glasgow, Hurston, and Smedley all demonstrate the dangers of
appropriating masculine models of the relation between public and private,
whether those models collapse the distinctions between public or private,
or rely on simplistic notions of an individual free from gender, race, and
class. Glasgow’s attempts to place the female subject within the agrarian nar-
rative only illustrate the extent to which that model depends on the denial of
female labor and reproduction in its construction. Furthermore, her assump-
tion of the agrarian perspective shows how feminist appropriations of mascu-
line models are dependent on the marginalization of race and class. And the
texts of Hurston and Smedley reveal that even these two “successful” authors
could not translate their private stories into a feminist public representative-
ness using masculine models of the public/private divide. Their texts come
to represent incoherent narratives of half-truths, concealing the more bitter
truth of the difference that the female body makes in the construction of the
public/private divide, a divide that successfully refuses to recognize what Jan
Pettman has called the “private inequality” of women and that yet manages
to reproduce itself through that very inequality.
Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1. This debate is taking place outside of feminist theory as well. A good
introduction to current debates about the pubic/private dichotomy is Jeff
Weintraub and Krishan Kumar’s Public and Private in Thought and Practice:
Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy.
2. Davidson and Hatcher critique separate spheres in two ways. First, they cri-
tique feminist historians’ and literary critics’ use of the model as essentialist
and exclusionary. Second, the authors not only critique this separate spheres
criticism, but reject separate spheres as a significant construct in nineteenth-
century U.S. culture. For example, the authors argue that “the [separate
spheres model] may have been less convincing as an explanation for what
actually happened in the nineteenth century than as an explanation for
what was happening, ideologically, in the American 1950s” (10). Thus, “we
have run the gamut of what the separate spheres model can tell us about the
nineteenth century and beyond” (11).
3. For representations of these views see Pateman, Nina Yuval-Davis, Jan Pett-
man, and Judith Squires.
4. The term “protean” is Jeff Weintraub’s.
5. Davidson and Hatcher argue that “separate spheres logic creates a structural
disincentive for thinking about nation in relationship to home, politics in
relationship to privacy, femininity in relationship to reason, and so on”
(20).
6. Trachtenberg also argues that the “building occupied the significant site
of the exact junction between the Court of Honor and Midway Plaisance,
just at the point of transition from the official view of reality to the world
of exotic amusement, of pleasure. Housing exhibits of domestic labor, vir-
tue, and order–exhibits of the ordering hand of women–the building rep-
resented the conceptual opposite, the most pointed moral contrast, to the
excitements of the Midway (221–22).

161
162 Notes to Chapter One

7. See Trachtenberg’s claim that the “prevailing note was domesticity, the
unique and uniquely virtuous powers of women as mothers, homemak-
ers, teachers, and cooks” (221).
8. The Women’s Representative Congress was organized by Sewall as a meet-
ing for the recently formed International Council of Women. Apparently,
Palmer organized a separate Congress for the Woman’s Building, but it is
not clear why a separate Congress was organized. See Weimann for the
most detailed account of the Woman’s Building and the Congresses. On
the International Council of Women see Leila Rupp.
9. Black feminist critics have tended to give more attention to the Represen-
tative Congress, because black women were excluded from representation
in most other venues—including the Board of Lady Managers. Hazel
Carby, for instance, has located the birth of the modern black feminist
movement at the Exposition. For discussions of black women’s participa-
tion in the Exposition see Massa and Reed. Here, I do not discuss how
black women’s speeches differ from white women’s but focus on their
similar definitions of civilization and citizenship. For discussions of late
nineteenth-century black women’s use of the rhetoric of civilization to
promote racial uplift and women’s equality see Tate and Gaines.
10. Sewall, the organizer of the Congress of Representative Women, also
compiled the speeches for publication.
11. See also the speech of D’Alcala of Greece, “To you O American women!
Lovers of progress, we look with hope. You are the van; you are the flag-
bearers. . . . To America has been intrusted the privilege of develop-
ing the highest qualities of womanly character and granting unrestrained
action to them” (Sewall 644).
12. Similar statements were made by McDonnell, “In securing to women
enlarged opportunities, provincial law-makers have placed our young
nation on a higher plane, for it is well-known fact that the civilization
of a nation may be ascertained to-day more truly by the economic and
social status of its women than by its consumption of coal, lumber, or
pig-iron” (Sewall 682).
13. I mention this because at least one historian, David Downey, notes the
“irony” of the women using the Woman’s Building, a separate gendered
space, to articulate their equality with men. This is not surprising to most
feminist theorists.
14. The intertwining of the discourse of civilization and the domestic
has been remarked upon in studies of empire and nationalism, most
particularly in Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather. Most critics point
out how domestic ideology becomes women’s special role in furthering
the creation of nationhood. However, this same discourse was originally
used against women by those who were against women’s participation
in the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War; the discourse of
Notes to Chapter Two 163

Christianity, civilization, and women’s status was, however, taken up by

suffragists to argue for their own rights. Nineteenth-century women were
well aware of the way in which these discourses could be manipulated
in both directions. Part of their intent, then, at the Exposition was to
distinguish their notion of civilization from the dominant ideology
crafted by elite men.
15. And Gail Bederman argues, in Manliness and Civilization, that Turner’s
implicit concern for masculinity was taken up in numerous distinct venues
throughout the early twentieth century.
16. In fact, according to Weimann, Isabella Beecher Hooker passed about a
circular reminding Connecticut women of the importance of maintaining
good relations between northern and southern women. See Weimann and
Massa for more information about the decisions leading up to the decision
to exclude black women from the board.
17. It probably did not help that a representative from South Dakota was placed
in charge of gathering information about industrial women. Women’s eco-
nomic independence was of particular interest to the nonsuffragist Palmer
and to the Southern women who spoke at the Woman’s Congress in the
Woman’s Building.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1. For a discussion of the different genres in which the working-girl was repre-
sented, see Laura Hapke’s Tales of the Working-Girl: Wage-Earning Women in
American Literature, 1890–1925.
2. Each of these texts was popular when it was first published, but each is
currently neglected. Van Vorst’s text received national recognition when
President Roosevelt wrote the preface to the book, which was originally
published in Everybody’s Magazine. Richardson was a journalist for such
publications as the Social Democrat and the New York Herald and The Long
Day was a bestseller. Laughlin was a bestselling novelist and travel writer
who originally wrote her essays for a Chicago newspaper before publishing
them as a collection.
3. For an early and interesting essay on middle-class women’s isolation dur-
ing this era, see social geographer R. Miller’s “The Hoover in the Garden:
Middle-Class Woman and Suburbanization, 1850–1920.”
4. Three major histories of urban working-class women are relevant here:
Joanne Meyerowitz’s The Woman Adrift that I mention later; Christine
Stansell’s City of Women which is a social history of working-class women
in the pre-Civil War era and Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements which focuses
on working-girls’ social life away from the home. Stansell’s archival work
in nineteenth-century working-class women’s history reveals the scant
attention given to working-girls prior to the Civil War. Most early reform
164 Notes to Chapter Three

societies’ efforts are directed generally to the poor, to widows, to pregnant

women, or to seamstresses working in their homes.
5. If this were not clear enough from a reading of Van Vorst’s text, then Theo-
dore Roosevelt, in his preface to the book, makes it explicit when he con-
demns “Americans” who refuse to reproduce as “criminal[s] against the race”
(2).
6. Richardson, like her narrator, according to William O’Neill and Cynthia
Sondik Aron, was the daughter of a country doctor; like her narrator, she
moved to the city in search of “mental” work after her parents’ deaths, only
to find herself forced into factory work. Sondik Aron has doubts about the
authenticity of Richardson’s experiences as a working-girl. However, neither
Richardson nor her narrator claims to be from anything but a middle-class
Protestant background.
7. See O’Neill’s introduction to the novel in Women at Work, Sondik Aron’s
more recent introduction to the novel, Meyerowitz, and Enstad. All are his-
torians.
8. See Meyerowitz, Enstad, and Hapke.
9. Through the novel, Richardson attempts to claim or reclaim a kind of
working-girl homosociality. She dedicates the novel to her “lady-friends”
and writes of the term, “I know all the prejudices of polite society, which
smiles at what is esteemed to be a piece of vulgar vanity characteristic of the
working-girl world. . . . [but] there is none other to designate the highest
type of friendship, no other phrase to define that affection between girl and
girl which is as the love of sisters” (198).
10. For contemporaneous accounts of these transformations see my discussion
of Howell’s above and Gilman; useful historical interpretations of changes in
housing conditions at the turn of the century include Haltunnen, Trachten-
berg, Marsh, Spain, Hayden, and Hawes. Most of these interpretations do
not focus on gender; when they do, they do not clearly explicate how urban-
ization helped to affect these changes.
11. See Grier, Haltunnen, and Spain.
12. Two other reform texts on working-girls mention the parlor: Making Both
Ends Meet (1911) and A Study of the Conditions of Self-Supporting Women in
New York City (1915).

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1. Some earlier works on gender and regional writing include Regionalism
and the Female Imagination (1985) and Teaching Women’s Literature from a
Regional Perspective (1982).
2. King is writing in 1980 prior to much revisionary feminist criticism writ-
ten on Glasgow. But certainly he must have been aware of her writing.
King’s claims, however, seem quite typical of many claims made about the
Notes to Chapter Three 165

renaissance by scholars. Critics usually view paternal lineage and the recov-
ery of memory as primary. In another vein, Daniel Joseph Singal makes
similar claims about the renaissance in The War Within: From Victorian
to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945. Singal, like most critics,
includes Glasgow as a precursor to the renaissance. Glasgow’s most nota-
ble supporter among Southern literary historians has been Louis Rubin,
who sees her as a “necessary bridge” between 19th-century literature and
the renaissance. He notes that there is hardly any subject taken up in the
renaissance that Glasgow has not already touched upon in her novels.
3. Marjorie Pryse and Barbara Ewell point to the assertion of place and region
as an “essentialist” position in the writings of those male authors who see
regional difference as the only difference that matters. Other feminist
responses include Patricia Yaeger’s reconsideration of how the “small” con-
cerns of writers such as Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty represent
regional—and gendered—concerns through representations of the every-
day and the body. Anne Goodwyn Jones argues that the work of gender in
the southern renaissance must be understood in terms of women writers’
embracing of a national feminist ideal, while their southern male counter-
parts experienced the postwar as a time of alienation and loss, an alienation
reflected in their regionalist frameworks. Yaeger’s essay appears in Haunted
Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, which is a direct response to the omis-
sion of gender in studies of the pre-contemporary South. The introduc-
tory essay, “Rethinking the South through Gender,” explicitly addresses
King and argues that his and others’ “theoretical assumptions are—perhaps
unconsciously—homologous with dominant Southern ideological patterns”
(Donaldson and Jones 5).
4. See also Ransom’s essay in I’ll Take My Stand. He writes in “Reconstructed
but Unregenerate” that the culture of the South “long ago came to terms
with nature, fixed its roots somewhere in the spaces between the rock and in
the shade of the trees, founded its comfortable institutions, secured its mod-
est prosperity—and then willed the whole in perpetuity to the generations
which should come after” (5).
5. Stark Young complains about young women from good families using their
family name and image to help companies market their products. This
could not have been as common an occurrence as young southern women
from all backgrounds going to work in factories, shops, and offices. But for
Young’s purposes it emphasizes the relation between women’s opportunities
in the “New South” and the denigration of the family—and the order asso-
ciated with that family.
6. Susan Lurie discusses Barren Ground, and Dorinda’s lack of identifica-
tion with Idabella in particular, in relation to two Virginia legal decisions
of 1924: the law against miscegenation and the law allowing the steriliza-
tion of poor, white, and unmarried Carrie Buck. Lurie is most interested in
166 Notes to Chapter Three

how Glasgow writes against the eugenicist—racist and sexist—aims of these

laws. My own reading suggests that the laws are also about inheritance and
property. Both laws have the effect of making it difficult, if not impossible,
for illegitimate children to have a legal status within southern culture.
7. As Dorinda says later, referring to Idabella and Dr. Greylock’s children,
“‘What the law doesn’t acknowledge, I suppose it doesn’t bother about’”
(492). This comment follows her stepson’s suggestion that the children
might bear some familial responsibility for the now dispossessed and ailing
Jason. But Dorinda’s answer suggests, even if it is not what she means, that
the law can hardly ask illegitimate offspring to take responsibility when they
have no rights of inclusion through inheritance.
8. Compare Dorinda’s embarrassment when Jason takes her home at how Old
Farm looks, and her disgust at the disorder of Five Oaks, discussed above.
Only Eudora’s obsession with cleanliness prevents the interior of Old Farm
from becoming a reflection of the dissipation at Five Oaks. This difference
between the two farms is racialized as a reflection of Idabella’s slatternli-
ness, as an example of African-American “slighting,” and as a more general
reflection of the effect of miscegenation. Later in the novel, Dorinda claims
that “slighting” has ruined both blacks and whites. However, Eudora can-
not said to be “slighting,” merely ineffective, because of her place within the
gendered economy of agrarianism. Similarly, Idabella’s and Dorinda’s maid
Fluvanna’s positions within the racial economy might adequately explain
their refusal to work, or at least to work according to Dorinda’s standards.
If race and gender define who can make a claim to inheritance, then their
work is wasted in a way that Dorinda—who like her mother is obsessed
with waste—does not want to comprehend.
9. Significantly, Rufus is off gambling and killing when he should be at home
fixing his mother’s churn. Not only does the son receive the mother’s and
daughter’s share of their own labor, but he actually impedes their labor. This
seems true of Ralph McBride in Vein of Iron, as well; his joy ride with the
young girl Minna ends in a paralyzing accident that costs the family its sav-
ings and forces Ada to return to work, necessitating the deferment of her
own desire to have another child.
10. The farm originally belongs to Dorinda’s maternal grandfather. Dorinda’s
father deeds the farm back to Eudora before his death. Neither Rufus nor
Joshua want to work the farm, so Dorinda inherits it from her mother.
11. Many critics have discussed Dorinda’s relation to the land. Most contex-
tualize this relation in terms of the pastoral tradition, or, as in Raper, in
relation to the myths of the frontier and the Southern garden. Joan Santos
is the only critic to situate Barren Ground within a specifically agrarian
context. She does not provide a specific analysis of the agrarians nor does
she take gender into account in her work. Critics often read Dorinda’s
mastery of nature as an assumption of masculine position, achieved only
Notes to Chapter Three 167

through the disciplining of her own female body. However, I know of no

critic who has discussed the property owning aspects of Dorinda’s recla-
mation of the land. For different analyses of Dorinda’s relation to the land
see Harrison, Raper, Bond, Levy, and Holman, as well as Caldwell.
12. Elizabeth Harrison makes a similar point about race in Vein of Iron. She
does not connect this to the situating of the Shawnee within the text,
who, having been eradicated from the wilderness, are able to provide a
historical alternative to the regional framework without miring Glasgow
within the contemporary racial politics that continually emerge in Barren
Ground. But I argue that even this imagined historical distance emerges as
a problem in Vein of Iron.
13. On the wilderness as a concept in U.S. culture, see Slotkin, Nash, and
Cronon. Also, see Kolodny and Comer for analyses of gender and the
wilderness concept.
14. Faulkner and Hurston are exceptions.
15. Similarly, Raper notes that Ada’s sexuality must exist outside time and
space (37). I argue that Ada’s sexuality cannot exist within the confines
of southern regionalism; thus, Glasgow appropriates the wilderness as a
space outside the conventional codes of inheritance that define the cul-
ture. The public space that is not “owned”—like the “public” roads of
Barren Ground—functions as a site of illicit behavior.
16. Middle landscape, a pastoral device that rejects both city and wilderness
and represents the middle ground of a cultivated settlement, is Leo Marx’s
term in The Machine in the Garden. Marx also notes the frequent pasto-
ral device of describing people as sheep. It is no accident that people are
often described as sheep in Vein of Iron or that Ada experiences her revela-
tion about the earth while contemplating the sheep Minnie and Martha.
Glasgow’s appropriation of this device is not as clearly defined as her use
of the wilderness.
17. Harrison argues that “Although the Fincastles return to Ironside at the
end in order to recapture the old life they had led, they do so to regain
autonomy and to farm side by side instead of maintaining the gender spe-
cialized roles required by industrialized society” (34).
18. Part of Ada’s plan to restore the manse involves Toby and one of the
Geddys, the only black family of the village, working the garden: “Toby
Waters or some old Geddy will be glad to work it in return for his
living. That’s the good thing about a village. There’s always somebody to
do nobody’s job” (403). This recruitment of the idiot and the African-
American to work the manse’s garden is central to Ada’s desire to ignore
how history structures her own desires. In this scenario, the Geddys and
the idiots stand outside that history—the idiot representing the stasis of
the village, and the interchangeability of the Geddys representing the
insignificance of blacks as individuals—that Ralph questions, even as they
168 Notes to Chapter Four

are its products. Glasgow’s representation of Toby and the Geddys could
be usefully compared to Faulkner’s treatment of the same subjects in The
Sound and the Fury.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1. For an overview of recent feminist theories of autobiography see Smith and
Watson. And Leigh Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography is a particularly
helpful analysis of the relations between truthtelling, trauma, self-representa-
tion, and genre.
2. Berlant’s work and the work of Benedict Anderson, on the nation as an imagi-
nary construct, are useful in helping to explain how the private individual
may become a representative citizen.
3. See also Mohanty and Probyn.
4. Hurston explicitly states that African-Americans seek out Eatonville to escape
the Reconstruction South; she tends to emphasize southern Florida’s differ-
ence from the rest of the South.
5. Only Plant and Rodriguez mention the frontier.
6. I have borrowed this phrase from Hurston’s Mules and Men.
7. Hurston claims to be nine when her mother dies, but records show that Lucy
Hurston died in 1904. So Hurston would have been thirteen at the time of
her mother’s death. Pam Bordelon, in an essay I discuss below, suggests that
this battle may actually have occurred when Zora arrived home from school;
the feather-bed may have been the object of contention, since Hurston later
tells readers that a similar battle was waged over the bed, but that it was a fight
between her brother John, on her behalf, and her father, and not a physical
altercation between her stepmother and herself. I am not entirely convinced
by this argument, but I find the story about the bed to be more provoking—
and probably more painful for Zora—than her story about Sarah. Sarah is
mentioned only once more in the text; although as Bordelon notes, Zora lived
for several years in Baltimore at the same time as her sister, Sarah’s presence in
Baltimore is never referred to in the text.
8. “At the time of Jon’s death in Memphis in 1918, Mattie was still his
wife. . . . Winifred Hurston Clarke verifies this information, revealing the
fact that Mattie Hurston got along well with John Hurston’s other children.”
Hurston Clarke reports that she did not understand until she was an adult
that Mattie Hurston was not her father’s biological mother. (Bordelon 11)
9. See Diana Miles for a similar argument. However, Miles takes a more positive
view of Hurston’s repetitive return to and revising of her mother’s death than I
do. She does not give much attention to the second section of the text.
10. On lying and masking as subversive strategies in African-American culture,
see Baker and Gates; on lying as a form of signifying in Dust Tracks, see
Meisenhelder and Plant.
Notes to Chapter Four 169

11. Meisenhelder reads the relation between Zora and the white women in a
similar way, although she emphasizes their appreciation of Hurston’s exoti-
cism and Hurston’s ability to perform for the women while maintaining
her freedom of self-definition (149–150). In general, Meisenhelder reads
Hurston as a trickster figure/writer throughout the autobiography.
12. Meisenhelder sees Big Sweet and the white granny as similar in their power
and argues that Big Sweet represents the kind of powerful ability to “back
her crap” that the white man sees as constitutive of frontier citizenship. Boi
concurs with this view.
13. See Anne McClintock, in Imperial Leather, on women as simultaneously
symbol of and marginalized in the construction of the nation.
14. Carmon’s remark is quoted in Paula Rabinowitz’s Labor and Desire, one of
the few studies to discuss the novel. Mostly, as Rabinowitz indicates, critics
have either seen the novel as flawed because 1) the proletarian text mars
the feminism of the novel or 2) the feminism mars the proletarian plot.
Recently, Sondra Guttman has argued that it is race, and Marie’s fear of
race, that mars the plot. My own argument is that if there is an incoher-
ence in the text, it is related, as in Hurston’s text, to the inability of a female
author to articulate the difference that the female body makes in becom-
ing a representative political subject. The public/private divide is obviously
implicated in the gender versus class debate about the novel. Just as race is
an identifiably political category within the public section of the text, so
class and nation become identifiably political categories in Smedley’s novel.
But neither writer, because they draw on the frontier model of citizenship,
can articulate gender as a political category.
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Index

A Davidson Cathy N. and Jessamyn Hatcher,

Addams, Jane, 23 No More Separate Spheres! 1–3,
Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 25 7, 9, 157–159, 161
Agrarianism, 23, 73–78, 84–89, 106–109 Davis, Angela, 3
Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, 46, 49 Dorman, Robert, Revolt of the Provinces, 72
Angelou, Maya, 122 Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie, 43
Anthony, Susan B., 13, 14, 19
Autobiography, 111–114, 121, 133–135, F
138–139 Female body, 74, 89, 134–139, 146–147
and public/private divide, 131–134,
B and working-girl, 30–32, 35–37, 40–41
Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization, 138–139
11–12, 14, 163 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 114
Berlant, Lauren, 111 Fraser, Nancy, 9
Boi, Paolo, 131 Frontier, 115–116, 131–139
Bordelon, Pam, 122 and citizenship, 20, 24, 112–113, 126–
Bremer, Sydney, Urban Intersections, 27 130, 150
and gender, 126–131, 139–140, 142–
C 147, 149
Caldwell, Ellen, 73–74 Fryer, Judith, 69
Citizenship,
and autobiography, 111–115, 133–135 G
and civilization, 10–12, 14–17, 20–21 Gaines, Kevin K., note and 131
black masculine model, 123–125, 128, Gelfant, Blanche, 43
130, 132–134, 136–137 Gilmore, Leigh, The Limits of Autobiography,
black women’s, 126–127, 131–134, 138 112, 168
white masculine model, 8–9, 18–22, 112– Glasgow, Ellen, 23, 70, 73–74, 77, 157, 160
114, 124, 128–131, 146–152 Barren Ground, 74, 77, 79–92, 104, 109
women’s, 13, 18–24, 57, 58, 62–63, A Certain Measure, 78
144–145 Vein of Iron, 23, 74

D H
Davidoff, Leonore, 6 Hall, Stuart, 6

179
180 Index

Hansen, Karen, 5, 6 P
Harper, Frances Watkins, 16 Palmer, Bertha, 13, 22
Harrison, Elizabeth, 107 Pateman, Carol, 1, 4
Home, Public/private divide, 16, 24–25, 129–
and female subjectivity, 28–29, 41–45, 130, 135–137, 144–146
52–60, 63–64, 70 and autobiography, 111–113, 114, 122,
and urban environment 23, 30–37, 39, 138
41–47, 50 and female body, 131–134, 138–139,
as social location, 13, 17–22, 26–29, 142–143
41 in feminist theory, 1–5, 12–13, 157–
Hooks, bell, 3 160
Howe, Julia Ward, 16–17, 18 and home/domestic realm, 17–23, 56,
Howells, William D., A Hazard of New 60, 140–141, 159–160
Fortunes, 64–65 and regionalism, 71–74, 78, 83, 91–93,
Hurston, Zora Neale, 24, 112, 157, 160 99–100, 105–109
Dust Tracks on a Road, 113–138, 139, and separate spheres, 1–3, 5–7, 12–13,
141–142 16–17, 21
Mules and Men, 117, 129 and social realm, 4–8, 11, 13, 17–23,
Their Eyes Were Watching God, 117 26, 28
and urban environment 54, 56, 58,
I 60, 70
I’ll Take My Stand, 74–78
R
K Rabinowitz, Paula, 169
Kawash, Samira, 138 Regional aesthetic 74, 75, 76–78, 83, 86,
King, Richard, A Southern Renaissance, 88–92, 104
72–72, 108, 164 Regionalism, 71–74, 91–92, See also pub-
lic/private divide
L Rich, Adrienne, 113
Lacey, Nicola, 4 Richardson, Dorothy, The Long Day, 26,
Landes, Joan, 5 28, 42–54, 58, 60, 64, 66–67,
Laughlin, Clara, The Work-a-Day Girl, 26, 69–70
28, 53–64, 66, 67–68, 69–70 Rose, Gillian, Feminism and Geography, 7
Libbey, Laura Jean, 44–5, 47 Rydell, Robert, 10–11
Lister, Ruth, 4
Location, 113, 115, 138 S
Lurie, Susan, 83, 165 Separate spheres, see Public/private divide
Lytle, Andrew Nelson, 75, 76, 77–78, 107 Sewall, May Wright, 13, 15, 22, 162
Smedley, Agnes, 24
M Daughter of Earth, 113, 138–155, 157,
Mardorossian, Carine M., 155 160
Marsh, Margaret, 65–66 Smith, Sidonie, 133–134
Massey, Doreen, Space, Place, and Gender, Spain, Daphne, Gendered Spaces, 65,
7–8 69–70
Meyerowitz Joanne, 163, 164 Squires, Judith, 4
Misenhelder, Susan Edwards, 124, 129 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 16
Index 181

T and American society 23, 33–35

Tate Allen, 73, 75–77 and female body, 30–33, 35–38,
Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of 40–41, 50
America, 9, 14, 19, 20, 161, 162 and middle-class women, 28–29, 38–
Trump, Eric, 14 42, 47–51, 54–57, 62–66, 70
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 20, 22, 24, 112, and parlor, 28, 64–70
141 and public/private divide 54, 56, 58,
60, 70
U as cultural type, 23, 43–45
Urban environment (city), see Public/private as trope of downward mobility, 25–30,
divide; Home 41–44, 50, 54, 59–63
in storybooks, 41–44, 44–52, 63
V World’s Columbian Exposition,
Vorst, Bessie Van, The Woman Who Toils, 26, Board of Lady Managers 10, 13, 21, 23
28–42, 43, 45, 47–48, 53–54, design, 8–11
60, 62–64, 70 Woman’s Building 8, 9–10, 14, 20, 22
Women’s Congress 14, 22;
W World’s Congress of Representative
Walker, Pierre, 114 Women 8, 11, 13–23, 112–
Watson, Richie, 74 113, 157, 159
Weimann, Jeanne Madeline, The Fair Wright, Gwendolyn, 65–66
Women, 10, 13, 161
Wharton, Edith, House of Mirth, 68–69 Y
Wilderness, 92, 97–103 Yezierska, Anzia, “The ‘Lost
Wilson, Elizabeth, 66 Beautifulness,’” 69
Working-girl, Yuval-Davis, Nina, 4