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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

Angela Weaver

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______Director Dr. Timothy Melley

______Reader Dr. Madelyn Detloff

______

Reader Dr. Martha Schoolman

______Reader Dr. Andrew Hebard

______Dr. Marguerite Shaffer Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

PUBLIC NEGOTIATION: MAGAZINE CULTURE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP, 1900-1930

by Angela Weaver

Public Negotiation: Magazine Culture and Female Authorship, 1900-1930 analyzes the convergence of modernism, print culture, feminism, True Womanhood, and the early careers of four female writers. At this crucial moment, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson each publicly negotiated with the dominant rhetorical and ideological registers of the emerging magazine market, infusing the available means of representation with new, sometimes transformative meanings. In the 1910s and 1920s, magazines served to spread a conservative ideology of womanhood more widely and rapidly than at any previous historical moment. This study asks how a writer secures a paycheck from an organ whose purpose was to promote the very politics she resists in her own writing. How did female writers construct their identities early in their careers while also challenging popular constructions of female identity from within a rapidly expanding print culture? To understand early twentieth century American literature, we must understand the strategies women used to ensure that a variety of experiences of modernity—female, working woman, Jewish, lesbian, African-American—found expression in print culture.

There is no single pattern of negotiation; each woman responds in her own way. Stein retained control, persistently making it difficult for venues with a certain claim to modernism to refuse her critique. Parker developed an aesthetic of ironic wit, using humor to challenge conservative ideologies and to draw readers into a critique of themselves. Dunbar-Nelson conflated the passing narrative with the more popular romance narrative to develop a powerful critique of racism and sexism in magazine culture, while Ferber used business rhetoric to create the nation‘s most popular and controversial female protagonist. Each author posed important challenges to the ideological positions of their magazines and reading audiences. Each of these writer‘s responses provides a powerful example of how periodical culture required that female writers both perform and subvert popular constructions of womanhood to achieve success.

PUBLIC NEGOTIATION: MAGAZINE CULTURE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP, 1900-1930

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Department of English

Angela Weaver Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2009

Dissertation Director: Dr. Timothy Melley

Angela L. Weaver 2009 Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One: Business and Domesticity in Edna Ferber‘s Emma McChesney Stories ...... 21

Chapter Two: Representations of Women in Dorothy Parker‘s Early Magazine Work ...... 51

Chapter Three: Gertrude Stein as Debutante in Vanity Fair and the Little Review ...... 80

Chapter Four: Alice-Dunbar and Female Authorship in Turn-of-the-Century Popular and African-American Magazines ...... 118

Bibliography ...... 160

iii

Acknowledgments

Miami University‘s English graduate program played a significant role in the creation of this manuscript. The Sinclair Dissertation Fellowship, as well as Department of English Teaching Assistantships, allowed me the time to work on this project. I want to thank my committee: Dr. Timothy Melley, Dr. Peggy Shaffer, Dr. Madelyn Detloff, and Dr. Martha Schoolman. I am grateful to Madelyn Detloff for helping shape the initial concept for the dissertation. Your thoughtful, intelligent feedback initially on my prospectus and then throughout the process was invaluable. I want to thank Peggy Shaffer for opening my eyes to new avenues for interdisciplinary work in history, American Studies, gender studies, and literature. My views of teaching and scholarship have broadened each time I have worked with you. To Martha Schoolman, I am grateful for your support and feedback. Finally, Tim Melley, my dissertation director, could not have been more supportive over the last several years. Throughout the process, you helped me sharpen my ideas and focus my argument. I am indebted to you for your careful readings of each stage of the manuscript and the consistent engagement you offered me as a teacher and a scholar. I truly owe a debt of gratitude for the supportive environment my committee fostered throughout the process.

Fellow graduate students at Miami University were integral to my development as well. Shawna, what can I say? You‘ve been there through all of it and I can‘t thank you enough. You always believed in this project, and your habit of asking questions helped me learn to talk about my ideas. I‘ll always be grateful to Lisa Suter for her generous spirit and sense of humor. We were conspirators in a plot to finish, and we pulled it off. Jamie Calhoun and Erin Douglas, you are both good friends and good teachers, and I‘ll always value our time together at Miami. To Lisa Riddle and Stephanie Corbin, can I just say, thanks for never giving up on me, no matter how many years I‘ve been in school.

I could not have made it through graduate school without the support of my amazing family. Michelle, you‘ve inspired me with your drive to accomplish your life‘s goals. Maria, I‘m so proud of you for finishing your dissertation, and it only makes my accomplishment all the

iv sweeter. I couldn‘t have two better sisters or friends. You have shaped the person I am and taught me to be proud of that person as well. Mom and Dad—thank you for never questioning my ambitions. Dad, without your gentle support and inspiring work ethic, I never would have made it this far. Mom, I started reading because I wanted to be like you. Your love of the written word helped shape my path in life, and I‘m eternally grateful.

And finally, thank you, John. Thank you for your relentless belief in my ability to accomplish anything. Your enthusiasm, curiosity, sense of adventure, and generosity have shaped me as a writer, scholar, and teacher. Your support and love guided me through the highs and lows of dissertating. You be bold; I‘ll be daring.

Introduction

Without the wild success of the American magazine industry, Calvin Coolidge would not have claimed ―the chief business of the American people is business‖ in 1925. Magazines encouraged the growth of a national advertising industry, which changed the way Americans did business and also changed the way people understood work, family, and gender. At the center of these changes were dozens and dozens of female writers vying for publication opportunities in one of the only venues open to them—popular magazines. In 1911, for example, the young writer Edna Ferber was mailing short stories to any magazine whose address she could find while also working in her mother‘s dry goods store. In her life, as in the lives of more and more American women, business, literature, and gender roles were becoming inextricably linked. Ferber‘s 1911 short story ―Roast Beef Medium‖ propelled her career. In this story and the series of stories following, Ferber actively uses the rhetoric of business to negotiate the tensions between feminism and the domesticity promoted by magazines and their advertisers. Therefore, a marriage proposal becomes a contract sealed with a handshake, not a kiss. Ferber‘s work is just one example of the ways female magazine writers in the early twentieth century invented narrative strategies that challenged restrictive ideologies in the very venues that legitimated those ideologies for profit. These negotiations reveal an American culture in flux, its men and women struggling for answers amid a rapidly growing and increasingly contradictory popular culture. As an archive, early twentieth century magazines offer significant insights into how women shaped their identities within this culture. The magazine presented a new discursive space, where shared meanings were contested, created, and reinforced. A hybrid publication, it included multiple print genres alongside advertising. The heterogeneity of the form allowed it to embody contradictory meanings, and those meanings shifted with time. Artists such as Nell Brinkley reinvested popular iconography with feminist overtones on one page and conservative

1 notes the next. Female writers such as Ferber subverted dominant models of proper female behavior on one page, and mimicked them the next. For example, Ferber redefined marriage as a female-led business contract but also presented the kitchen as a place a woman could be her most ―natural‖ self. Jennifer Scanlon shows that while conservative magazines such as Ladies Home Journal promoted middle-class, mainstream values, they simultaneously exposed the shortcomings of that values system In some magazines, everyday issues, such as domestic cleaning or cooking advice, shared space with articles about public political activism. As Simon Weil Davis points out, advertisers inscribed gendered differences while naturalizing racialized and nationalized subject positions. Advertisers embraced what Lears has called the therapeutic ethos, presenting a vision of self-realization not through social change but through consumption, and most Americans came to accept this vision quickly. In a 1916 issue of Vogue, for example, Dorothy Parker‘s first magazine publication, ―The Lady in Back,‖ shares a page with two ads that could ―solve‖ the problems of anonymity that come with big city life. The speaker of ―The Lady in Back,‖ a poem that exposes urban identity as unsatisfying, complains that the woman sitting behind her (at plays, movies, or the opera) is anonymous. No one knows if she is ―widow, maid, or wife.‖ The implied anonymity of urban entertainment venues prevents social interaction, and the dim lighting blocks the obvious physical cues that had begun to mark people‘s identities in the city. On the same page as the poem, advertisers vie for readers‘ attention, a Dagget & Ramsdell‘s Perfect Cold Cream advertisement reads, ―Your complexion is part of your attire; social affairs demand painstaking attention.‖ In other words, to communicate social and class standing, what should speak for you is your attire and your complexion—not the moral values or family history that would have preceded you in a small town. Many of these advertisements targeted single women, who had to tread very carefully in an urban environment and were expected to seek engagement quickly. An advertisement for Kohn & Son Diamonds promises to help get your wedding rings in order. Throwing a soirée? Higgins & Seiter can provide the crystal serving sets, ensuring your friends, neighbors, and colleagues that you have both leisure time and money. The context on this page provides insight into the specific demands suffered by women. It also shows Vogue trying to push a construction of female identity based on outward appearances and consumption at the same time that Parker‘s poem reveals the futility of this construction. Paying attention to these kinds of contradictions and tensions present in the

2 construction of female identity in magazines creates layers of meaning and understanding unavailable through study of other genres, or through study of a de-contextualized poem. The historical value of these women writers‘ magazine work is linked to the social and political experiences and identities of women in the early twentieth century. The magazine page brings together competing ideologies, cultural tensions, and the literary and business rhetorics that were to shape an American century. Each of the writers I examine in the pages that follow—Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson—develops her own strategy for negotiating the tensions between her own values and the hegemonic ideologies most often presented in print culture. All respond to modernity in complex ways, whether interlacing domestic situations with business rhetoric or using the popular romance plot as a vehicle for exploring the implications of racial and class passing. At their most interesting moments, the writers‘ narrative negotiations unsettle fixed gender, racial, and class identities in potentially creative and positive ways. Parker‘s ―The Lady in Back,‖ for example, conflates the play, the opera, and the ―humble picture show‖ while pointing out the impossibility of knowing whether the subject of the poem is ―dark‖ or ―fair,‖ ―rich‖ or ―poor,‖ single or married, from a good family, or not. Couched in a humorous poem, Parker‘s poem highlights the insignificance of fixed social, racial, and gender identities. Of course, all writers must balance their desire to communicate a specific worldview with their desire to be published. The writers in this study did so in specifically fierce and strategic ways, however. Ferber, Parker, Stein, and Dunbar-Nelson each struggle against a ―type‖ of woman always already identified and constricted by the magazines in which she published. Each of the authors challenges the models of both the True Woman and the New Woman, while Ferber also resists the working woman, Parker the flapper, Stein the ―incomprehensible‖ female intellectual, Dunbar-Nelson the tragic mulatto. What is truly interesting, however, is that these writers resist these stereotypical roles within venues seeking to codify those roles for profit and stability. By the early twentieth century, magazines were vying for an important readership. This readership was increasingly literate, with more leisure time. As conspicuous consumption became a prominent means of establishing social class, magazines began to recognize the value of advertising. Mass production met national advertising, and consumer demand skyrocketed. Editors needed content to lure readers to the advertisements, and a new market for short fiction boomed—a market more

3 welcoming to women‘s writing than previous markets. The stories and poetry published in magazines at this historical moment engaged with the cultural changes rocking the country, and with the advertising, contests, imagery, and editorial content that shared the magazine page. The meaning created by the juxtaposition of these writers‘ texts with other stories, advertising and images complicate easy understandings of magazine culture as simply middlebrow. While some content is middlebrow, taken together the magazine is a complex object of study. Analysis of the strategies of identification and negotiation each author employed helps us re-imagine women‘s responses to modernity in the contexts of modernism, realism, and periodicals. In part, then, this study serves as a recovery project. With the possible exception of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the authors in my study have not been ―forgotten.‖ However, much of the fiction, prose, and poetry they published in mass-circulation magazines has been forgotten. Recovering this work and offering an explanation for its significance, this study is an important contribution to feminist periodical scholarship. In the pages that follow, I argue that the often vexed relationship between text and context in periodical publication can be better understood by questioning the ways female authors critiqued the very ideologies promoted by the periodicals they relied on for publication and payment. Using a historical, cultural, and periodical studies approach, I explore the connections between this diverse group of female writers from differing class, racial, religious, and sexual backgrounds. Ferber was single Jewish woman from a working-class background; Parker was also Jewish, but enjoyed a privileged upbringing. After her parents‘ deaths, however, she had to earn her own living. Stein, a expatriate Jewish lesbian, enjoyed a small legacy inherited from her father that kept her from need most of her life. Dunbar-Nelson was bisexual and identified herself as Creole at times, though she was most likely the daughter of a black mother and white father. She struggled financially all of her life. What makes these writers‘ class, sexual, and racial identities important is that each writer struggled to express her unique identity while publishing in venues that did not respect or even recognize their class, race, religion, or sexuality. Each of these writers employed new techniques to create a place for themselves in American culture by moving from traditional modes of publication to the opportunities of the magazine market.

Turning to periodical culture, this study hopes to answer two questions central to how meaning about gender and writing was created, negotiated, disseminated and received in the

4 early twentieth century: 1) How does a female writer secure a paycheck from a venue whose purpose was to promote the very ideologies she resists in her own writing; 2) how did female writers construct their identities early in their careers while also negotiating popular constructions of female identity from within a rapidly expanding print culture?

In the 1910s and 1920s, the rapidly expanding magazine industry cashed in on (and often exacerbated) readers‘ fear and confusion about a changing society. Magazines spread new values about work, class, gender, and race more rapidly than any other vehicle at any previous historical moment. Rapidly developing printing technologies and reduced-cost postal services also supported the professionalization of the advertising industry in the United States. In turn, advertising financially supported large-scale distribution of magazines. As the resulting commercial culture grew, debates about gender roles, sexuality, race, and class inevitably raged within the pages of the country‘s ongoing magazine ―revolution,‖ to use Richard Ohmann‘s phrase. Magazines were numerous, quickly produced, and often ephemeral. Their heavy reliance on imagery opened new avenues for the construction of meaning. ―The face of a woman‖ on the magazine cover, Kitch notes, ―could represent both a specific type of female beauty and a ‗style‘ that conveyed model attributes—youth, innocence, sophistication, modernity, upward mobility.‖ Therefore, debates that had died down for numerous reasons in other venues continued with a fervor in magazines. For example, while nearly one-hundred novels were written about the New Woman between 1883 and 1900, the early twentieth century produced almost no novels about the issue. In part, the surge of modernist artistic production in the decades following the turn of the century made stories of the New Woman appear aesthetically deficient because of what Ann Ardis has identified as ―ideological self-consciousness‖ and intertextuality, so the stories have faded from scholarship, and thus from memory (New Women 3). In the 1910s, magazines helped to redefine the collective feminism of the early 1900s into the individual hedonism of the twenties. 1 At this distinct cultural moment, the writers in this study participated directly in this changing discourse through the first truly mass media: magazines.2 Throughout this period, the women‘s club movement, the African-American

1 Cultural historian and critic Carolyn Kitch argues that redefinitions of gender identities were continually constructed and articulated in the media in the period 1900-1920. The most relevant of these redefinitions were: from working/college woman to flapper girl; from collective movements to personal style; from voting to spending; from sexuality to sexy silliness. 2 For an insightful and rich argument for why magazines were, in fact, the first mass medium, see Richard Ohmann.

5 women‘s club movement, the suffrage movement, a growing female workforce, an increase in female college graduates, and Freud‘s revelations about sexuality led to a greater emphasis on reform by women in the public sphere. The First World War interrupted reform efforts by women, and in many instances, the end of the war signaled the end of women‘s demands for new rights and protections. Dominant images of young women ranged from the prim and proper Gibson girl to the carefree and sensual flapper. At the turn of the century, the most influential discursive model of womanhood available to American women was the ideology of True Womanhood. Largely a nineteenth-century conception, its influence remained pervasive during the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, major transformations in the American experience, such as the emergence of industrial capitalism, shifted the roles of men and women at home and in the market. Women‘s roles as the moral compasses and care-givers of the family intensified, while their roles as producers in a household economy (such as on a farm) decreased. Piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness became the publicly acceptable values for women; the proper expression of these values was through a well-ordered, Christian home. Typically, these Victorian values were realized only in middle and upper class white women‘s lives. While piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness became idealized hegemonic values for everyone, the priorities and realities of working class women, women of color, and immigrants excluded them from the lifestyle required by the ideology, even if they subscribed to it—a reality often used by ―high‖ society to confirm secondary status of nonwhites, immigrants, and the poor. Such inevitable exclusions from domestic ideology were hidden by the social processes that legitimated the ideology and by the scientific racism supported by the self-made man ideology and Social Darwinism. The opening stanza of ―Women,‖ a poem by Zona Gale published as the frontispiece to a 1913 issue of American Magazine, however, shows female magazines writer beginning to write a different kind of story for women. In the pages of many magazines, women writers showed the darker side of domesticity: They looked from farmhouse windows Their joyless faces showed Between the curtain and the sill— You saw them on the road. They looked up while they churned and cooked

And washed and swept and sewed. Some could die and some just lived and many a one went mad. But it‘s ―Mother be up at four o‘clock,‖ the men-folk bade. (June 1913, 9) Highlighting the ―joyless faces,‖ Gale questions the efficacy of domestic ideology in women‘s everyday lives. Magazines, because of the hybrid, contradictory nature of their content, opened up a public space for the expression of heretofore private resistance. The ideology of True Womanhood, however, did find expression in magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, which encouraged its female readers to become wives and mothers and to focus the whole of their emotional and intellectual efforts on the home. Translated by magazines, this ideology became consumer-oriented—a set of values requiring women to acquire proficiency as the home‘s central purchaser. Eighty percent of American women in their thirties were married in 1920. Often their roles had shifted toward wife-companion, consumer-in-chief, scientific homemaker, and educated child rearer (Brown Chapter 5). Legitimating these new roles, and legitimating marriage itself, mass-circulation magazines ran columns, gave advice, and printed fiction that explained how best to fulfill these new roles. The readers of American Magazine and Cosmopolitan, in which Ferber‘s stories appeared, were continually ―taught‖ how to be ideal wives and mothers. Vanity Fair and the Little Review taught readers how to be sophisticated and fashionable. Vanity Fair, which published Stein and Parker, taught women how to capture the heart of a sophisticated and fashionable man, while the Little Review focused mostly on men‘s works. Crisis and the Southern Workman taught women how to speak out against racism, but it restricted the available means for doing so (through education and club work). In all of these venues (though less so in the Little Review), advertisers and writers suggested that if a woman was unhappy, she could become happy by better fulfilling her roles or by purchasing the right consumer goods. Women seeking life beyond the ―joyless faces‖ at the window frequently turned to the figure of the New Woman. An alternative to the ideology of True Womanhood, ―New Woman‖ was a popular phrase describing women who were more active in the public sphere than their homemaking sisters. Martha Patterson describes the dominant image of the American New Woman as a ―white, well-educated, frequently single, and politically progressive woman‖ (19). Edna Ferber‘s protagonist, Emma McChesney, for example, was a single working mother, marking her as a New Woman for some readers. The image of the New Woman was inextricably

7 bound to the media, as the figure became a stand-in for disruptive social and cultural advancements for writers and advertisers. Writers debated, promoted, or vilified the figure in magazines and newspapers, which allowed women magazine writers to participate in a debate over the position of women in American society. The very existence of this kind representation of womanhood allowed female readers and writers to examine whether they were happy in the role of wife, mother, and unpaid domestic employee. The rise of higher education certainly helped usher in the New Woman. Fewer than 1% of American women attended college by 1900, but by 1930, that number had increased tenfold and ten percent of American women aged 18 to 21 were in college (Brown 133). Many female students faced hostile reactions from male faculty and male students. A number of prominent scientists and psychologists insisted that the strain of a college education would lead at best to neurasthenia and at worst to a shrunken reproductive system. The colleges themselves believed in differences between men and women—Vassar, a woman‘s college, claimed its purpose was to ―fill every womanly duty at home and in society‖ (Rosenberg 27). Many women who were able to complete a college education searched for outlets for their intellectual passions after college. The dominant image of the New Woman represents her as politically progressive. For many women in the early twentieth century, club work was a means to achieve Progressive reforms and it also provided a culturally accepted outlet for their desire to actively engage the world through organization, intelligence, and action. In a movement Rosenberg terms ―Domesticating the State,‖ female reformers during the Progressive Era insisted that the government should fix the problems caused by private power and self-interested political and economic behavior. From the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 to the Children‘s Bureau in 1912, from consumer activism to union efforts, the overarching theme of women‘s reform efforts was often a domestic agenda—protecting the health of the nation‘s women and children (Rosenberg 38). Discourse about the New Woman was prevalent in the media from the 1890s through the 1920s, from newspaper editorials and mass magazine covers to advertising and literature. Although the term ―New Woman‖ is habitually used as a celebratory one by scholars today, it was often a condemnation when used by the media at the turn of the century. Resistance to the New Woman figure called for the strengthening of older cultural identities, such as True Womanhood, as a way to overcome a perceived threat to tradition and cultural order. The ―New Woman‖ was a figure onto whom men and women alike layered hopes and anxieties about

8 exhilarating and threatening changes. Edna Ferber‘s protagonist, Emma McChesney, for example, was a single working mother, marking her as a New Woman for some readers. Ferber surely felt the pressure of these clashing tensions. A single woman with little desire to marry was a point of contention. A divorce rate of one in twelve couples by 1900 and one in nine couples by WWI, a reduction in birth rates for native-born, middle class urban white women, and a growing female workforce shook up earlier versions of normative heterosexual marriages (Riley qtd in Patterson 8). Magazines, however, continued to print New Woman short stories and articles well into the twentieth century. While novels never went ―out of style,‖ magazines—heavily funded by advertising revenue—needed short and serialized fiction to fill their pages, attract audiences, and sell advertising. Struggling and financially-secure writers alike vied for the notoriety and money their short fiction and poetry could land in the magazine market. It is in these periodicals— women‘s magazines, men‘s magazines, family magazines, modernist little magazines, and political magazines; ―highbrow,‖ ―middlebrow,‖ and ―lowbrow‖—that the debate over how a woman should live her life in American society picks up after the apparent silence by novelists about the New Woman at the turn of the century. To pick up this debate, I look at a wide range of magazines. Mass-circulation women‘s and mixed-gender periodicals (American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal) often had massive audiences, exceeding one million readers. To engage such large audiences, these magazines present widely contradicting messages and images. While they were the most likely to employ the figure of the True Woman, they did not ignore the New Woman, the intellectual, or the flapper in their pages. Large-circulation magazines directed at a slightly more select audience (Vanity Fair, Vogue) were able to narrow their messages more specifically. Trying to be cosmopolitan, these magazines purported to reject True Woman models but were often unable to shake this ideology completely. ―Little‖ magazines (The Little Review) were aesthetically-driven endeavors and when they included women, they presented them as ―intellectual.‖ The African- American press (The Southern Workman, Crisis) reached mid-level circulations, but its influence was profound. Often focused on political achievement, these magazines frequently present African-American women as caretakers, rather than actors in the public sphere. The female writers in this study note the tension between mass media‘s problematic social messages and the opportunities for cultural critique offered by their position as writers

9 within this periodical culture. Since they render the periodical culture they inhabited in their work, these writers offer the critic of modernism a window onto the evolving image of the female writer as defined in a transformative moment in twentieth century literary and cultural history. They confront masculine, heterosexual, Christian, and white stereotypes and the identification of female magazine writing with domestic ideologies and passive femininity. The racial and gender dynamics embodied in these writers‘ work reflect American culture‘s uneasy relationship to female self-invention, career women, female independence and intelligence, and African-American political involvement and self-definition in the early decades of the twentieth century. They also shed light on the discomfort much of the male literary establishment felt over the changing position of the ―writer.‖ At the same time, magazines sometimes recognized higher expectations and changing goals for women—companion rather than servant in marriage, for example, or the ―new business woman‖—especially if it seemed profitable to do so.3 The determining factor for profitability was advertising revenue, continuing the cultural process of integrating popular ideologies into consumption. With a literacy rate of ninety-four percent by 1920, there were millions of available readers with an increasing amount of leisure time (Brown, Setting a Course, 164). Advertisers paid top dollar for access to potential consumers, filling fifty percent of the big magazines by 1912 (Brown 70). Short and serialized fiction became the backbone of many monthly magazines—attracting hundreds of thousands of potential consumers. The writers in this study negotiated both the obviously restrictive models of womanhood (True Woman and domestic ideologies) and also the more ―progressive‖ models like the New Woman, which reified some traditional values attached to women‘s experiences while challenging others. This project fills a significant gap in scholarship on American modernism and on women‘s literature. Scholars have begun to broaden the canon of literary modernism to include more women and others attend to the relationship between modernism and the marketplace, but much of this scholarship focuses on the activities and works of men or address women only peripherally. Some new modernist studies address print culture, but not always the variety of literary styles and women‘s experiences that filled the pages of magazines—Maureen Honey‘s 2003 chapter in Middlebrow Moderns being a rare example. My project recognizes consumer culture, and the changing conceptions of selfhood, motivation, personality, and identity that

10 came with it as important facets of women‘s experiences and literature. As Rita Felski notes, ―to say that modern consumerism is as much about art as it is about politics is to recognize that key aspects of the aesthetic—playfulness, imagination, eroticism, loss of self—are often harnessed in a consumer culture to market goods‖ (Afterword 296). They are also harnessed to market literature in magazines. There is thus a pressing need in the field to look outside aesthetic and textual definitions of modernism to examine the cultural and literary contributions of women. The magazine writing of Ferber, Parker, Stein and Dunbar-Nelson reveals that women‘s discourses of modernity fluidly cross and dissolve boundaries of aesthetics, social and economic class, nationality, race, and consumerism. In order to construct useful female identities, these authors actively negotiated, shifted, and reconstructed the models of the True Woman, the New Woman, the working woman, the intellectual and flapper, the tragic mulatto, and the African- American helpmate within the magazine market. Only by continuing to deepen scholarship of modernism by paying attention to the voices of women magazine writers can we begin to recover these significant American discourses. In The Gender of Modernity, Felski posed the question: How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena…were given central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity? What difference would such a procedure make? Felski‘s question responds to a field that often belittles or ignores women‘s contributions, particularly those that cannot be categorized as modernist. Rather than simply work for the inclusion of a few more women into the modernist canon, Felski argues, scholars should recognize multiple aspects of the culture of women‘s modernity. In the years since The Gender of Modernity (1995), some of this work has begun. In Women’s Experiences of Modernity (2003), for example, Ardis and Lewis investigate textual evidence of women‘s crime, women‘s journalism, women‘s experiences at the Columbian expedition, homoeroticism during the Great War, and women‘s shift work. Harker, Botshon and Lewis, and Rubin highlight the significant political and cultural work performed by many texts whose lack of aesthetic innovation has

11 excluded them from the highbrow canon.4 I contribute to this growing discourse by recognizing the magazine market as an important aspect of the culture of women‘s modernity. All facets of this market provided women with a unique opportunity to explore their lives on the page. Therefore, I study writers and markets previously disregarded as too middlebrow (Ferber writing for American Magazine, for example) alongside markets and writers considered canonical (such as Stein‘s work for Little Review). The authors in this study—Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson--resist available models of womanhood, representing female autonomy and often connecting personal experience to social critique. Though they differed in strategy and emphasis, each insisted on the importance of unsettling fixed, restrictive categories of female identity in the magazine marketplace.

Recent studies such as Detmar and Watts‘ Marketing Modernisms have begun to analyze the ways men such as Eliot and Pound used the market. But without adequate work on women and the literary market, old formulations about the corrupting influence of consumer culture on susceptible women continue to keep the focus on how the market used women. As a relatively new field in literary studies, periodical studies has just begun to take up issues of women‘s magazine writing, the conflicts between narratives and publishing venues, and the position of women in a consumer society promoted by magazines. Recent works—Scott, Botshon and Goldsmith, Ammons, Ardis and Lewis, in particular—focusing on the intertextual meanings of objects of analysis have begun to deconstruct outdated formulations of modernity that excluded women‘s experiences and texts. These scholars are the point of departure for conceptualizing women‘s texts without reifying restrictive categories of female experience or identity. This study, then, views realism, naturalism, modernism, and other modes of discourse as equally compelling (and usually interrelated) ways of interpreting cultural surroundings in the early twentieth century. A crucial moment in women‘s history, the early twentieth century also ushered in the first truly mass media: magazines. This provided a new opportunity for American women writers.5 In urgent need of material and editorial staff, magazines quickly hired women to write and edit and solicited manuscripts by women.

4 Jamie Harker, America the Middlebrow, 2007; Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith, eds, Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s, 2003; Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middle/brow Culture, 1992. 5 While magazine publishing began in the 1750s in the United States, they didn‘t reach a large scale until the 1890s. In 1865, there were seven hundred titles and four million readers. In 1905, there were 6,000 titles and 64 million

As feminist scholarship on American women writers has progressed over the last decades, the focus has been on reclaiming writers whose voices had been marginalized or forgotten altogether. Scholars have recognized the ways American women writers speak to issues of sexuality, gender, class, and ethnicity across their pages. Tracing this tradition, scholars have identified American identity, and the place of women within American society, as major themes within women‘s writing. This tradition has led a number of scholars to reexamine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century as an important literary moment. Rita Felski, for example, hopes to ―destabilize a periodizing category…in order to explore some of the varying ways in which woman have been seen, and have seen themselves, as modern subjects‖ (Gender 209). Carolyn Kitch notes that one of the most influential ways women were ―seen‖ and learned to see themselves at the turn of the century was by reading the pages of magazines. My study builds on these observations by investigating how four writers began their careers during the explosion of the periodical press. Each writer learned from the magazines and used the magazine‘s conflicting value systems to negotiate a space for her unique identity as a woman, as a writer, and as an American. To understand early twentieth century American literature, we must understand the strategies women used to ensure that diverse experiences of modernity—female, working woman, Jewish, lesbian, African-American—found expression in print culture. This approach seeks to multiply our ideas of how female identity and authorial identity has been performed and conceived in periodical literature and culture. I study the connections between the pages of periodicals and the authorial identities women (and their editors) constructed to be published. I analyze the ways early twentieth century female authors investigate the conflict between diversity/equality and historically homogenous constructions of female identity, because the magazine page—for women— was a space associated with 1) domestic instruction and traditional patriarchal family constructions or, 2) the various constructions of female youth (the Gibson girl, for example) that allowed for brief flirtations and paid work before marriage. Magazines led the ideological charge in the transfer of female identity from within (character) to the external (the body) through commodification, spectacle, and display.

readers. For more information, see Carolyn Hitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover, 2001 and Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture.

For an American woman writer at the turn of the century to push back against these constructions, she first had to get published. The authors in this study made strategic compromises and striking accomplishments under financial, editorial, and ideological pressures to accomplish just that. This study relies on a close reading of the magazines and their historical contexts, the models and images of womanhood available to women within the magazines, the financial and editorial decisions inherent in the marketplace, and the aesthetic, social, and ideological connections to issues of women‘s modernism. There is no single pattern of negotiation; each woman responds in her own way. Ferber balanced domestic and feminist ideology as a way to resist true and new woman constructions of identity, and in so doing she created the nation‘s most popular and controversial female protagonist of the day. Parker developed an aesthetic of ironic wit to draw readers into a critique of themselves, proving herself to be more than the flapper or aesthete that men in her industry perceived her to be. Stein retained control of her avant-garde aesthetic, persistently making it difficult for venues with a certain claim to modernism to refuse her critique. She worked to construct herself as a comprehensible modernist. Dunbar-Nelson used symbolism and understatement to establish a powerful critique of racism and sexism in magazine culture, constructing a space for a middle- class, progressive, complex black woman in the pages of the African-American and mainstream press. Each response provides a powerful example of how periodical culture required female writers to both perform and subvert popular constructions of womanhood to become successful. Much of their success came from narratives that diverged from the magazine‘s primary content, narratives that did not center on romance and family. Many characters began in a domestic setting and then left it or suffered under the dictates of domesticity (such as Dunbar- Nelson‘s female characters). Some characters were independent from the beginning (such as Ferber‘s protagonist). However, even Ferber‘s protagonist participated in the romance/family narrative, using it to hook her readers but refusing to write within its script. Magazine writers also constructed protagonists in opposition to domesticity, children, and a home life, even though most marriageable women in the 1910s did in fact marry and have children. All versions of these characters were important to constructing an image of the progressive, independent woman. As a hybrid form driven by advertising, magazines offered women a complex venue for the construction and transformation of these new identities.

Higher education and politically-motivated club work was not the reality for many women, however, so female writers also needed to investigate representations of working women in their texts. Eleven percent of native white married women were working near the turn of the century, and nearly 38% of married black women worked. Immigrants could rarely secure a job on department store floors because of nativist sentiment even in largely immigrant cities like New York City. Instead, they were relegated to the often lower paying, more dangerous, less respectable positions in factories. In many newspapers and magazines in the early twentieth century, working women were classified as manly spinsters, aggressive reformers, or money- grubbing prostitutes. There were an estimated 200,000 female prostitutes in 1910, in part due to the $35 a week income such a job could garner but also due to a lack of education, trouble at home, and disreputable employment agencies (Rosenberg 23). Writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Abraham Cahan wrote about working women driven by uncontrollable environmental and internal force, controlled by the industrial work environment, greedy capitalists, and poor working conditions. Many male writers saw the working woman as a sign of a degenerate and dangerous consumer economy. As Ardis and Lewis note, modern anxieties were organized and expressed through representations of the ―consuming woman‖ (224). The writers in this study pressure these constructions through narrative strategies that allow them to employ both progressive and conservative ideologies and characters in their work. Ferber‘s protagonist sells petticoats, a feminine business—but she is an independent businesswoman nonetheless. Dunbar-Nelson‘s characters strive toward financial security, but are foiled by the class and racial passing necessary to achieve an ability to consume freely. Supported by advertising, magazine editors profited when they emphasized the importance of making money and consuming products. Women magazine writers like Ferber and Dunbar-Nelson used rhetoric as a way to build their own stories and meanings about the consuming woman. Literary representations of young women who worked became a kind of genre, especially in the magazines. Writers like William Sydney Porter (O.Henry) gained fame and fortune writing short stories in this genre. For working class women, clerical work could be an escape from manual labor, and for middle class women, this work was often a way to occupy time until marriage (Brown, Course). However, as Nancy Woolworth notes, ―the story of the women who worked for pay was largely the story of those excluded by the domestic ideal by age, class, race,

15 or need, although it still determined their options and expectations‖ (222). Through the dictates of True Womanhood, domesticity was the only culturally acceptable goal for women in the 1910s. Service work in these newly expanding industries, however, became a tolerable (if temporary) reality for many women.6 Some magazines employed scores of women, despite the articles and editorials in the pages of their publication denouncing women‘s paid work. Scanlon notes, ―advertising women, in writing ads that provided a narrow definition of women‘s lives, a definition confining women to the home and market—secured their own independence, financial and otherwise‖ (Scanlon). Magazine writers, however, were better able to counter the ―consumer as prescription‖ model promoted by the advertising agencies. Writers like Ferber represented working women as capable contributors to industry and culture. In June 1913, American Magazine published ―A Creed of Work for Women‖ by Laura Drake Gill, a women‘s college president. In it, Gill—and by virtue of association, American Magazine—asserts that women benefit commercially, socially, intellectually, and ethically from work. However, she continues, ―I believe that every woman should expect marriage to interrupt for some years the pursuit of any regular gainful occupation…and that she should focus her chief thought during the early youth of her children upon the science and art of wise family life‖ (85). In this environment, most married women typically worked only because they had to, not because they wanted to (Brown 98). Many married women often found it necessary to work out of economic necessity and to keep up with new consumer demands, or to escape the wife/ mother/ housekeeper roles that kept them confined. Some of those who worked viewed it as a service to the family rather than as an expression of autonomy. Readers, then, may have been thrilled to see Dunbar-Nelson and Ferber‘s stories, which present work as a potentially transformative endeavor. Scientific rhetoric of the day, however, assumed that a middle or upper- class married woman would succumb to bouts of neurasthenia and be unable to care for her family if she was a paid employee. These views, too, were often expressed in the editorials, stories, and advertising in popular magazines. African-American women and immigrant women were not susceptible, the rhetoric claimed, because they were less intellectual.

6 Lynn Wienar explains the hierarchy of social status that established itself, wherein women working in higher- paying factories were designated as lower status than those working in lower-paying clerical or department store jobs. This made it easy for employers to staff businesses cheaply because businesses could deny good wages due to the high demand for these socially acceptable positions. Many believed that while it might be acceptable for single girls to work temporarily, they should leave the workforce upon marriage.

While African-American women were often invisible in the pages of popular magazines, the African-American press constructed models of black womanhood designed to reject mainstream stereotypes even as they problematically embraced other mainstream domestic values. For African-American women writers, then, exploring their role within American society often required writing through and against divisive stereotypes and assumptions about people of color in general and about African-American women in particular. In response to stereotypes about black female sexuality, intelligence, and respectability, many black women writers sought the construction of an identifiable black middle class. As such, available models of black womanhood in early-twentieth-century African American magazines included the homemaker and the clubwoman. These were not simple parallels to the True Woman and the New Woman, however. Reclaiming their voices within domestic spaces reaffirmed the black family while speaking out as clubwomen created a safe space for progressive political involvement in American society. African-American publications at times used Gibson-style drawings and photographs as covers, in order to broaden the availability of ―womanhood currency,‖ in Kitch‘s terms (99). Constructions of female identity in African-American magazines could sometimes be restrictive or exclusive, reinforcing the desirability of mainstream, middle-class ideals. Well- educated, light-skinned black women, for example, often appeared on the cover of Crisis magazine, while stories of teachers and nurses (typically caretaker roles) appeared frequently in its pages. These images, even if conservative, still resisted the ―mammy‖ and ―tragic mulatto‖ stereotypes frequently reproduced in mainstream white advertising. Another popular model of womanhood available to women reading American magazines represented young women—like most of the women in this study—in particular. James Montgomery Flagg, who illustrated Ferber‘s stories in American Magazine, was responsible for establishing one of the new types of women defined by ―romance, home, and consumption.‖ ―The ‗ideal American women‘ of Flagg and Gibson became not only their trademarks but national institution‖ (Tebbel and Zuckerman qtd in Kitch 5). His ―institution‖ was a young, active, flirtatious girl who liked to have fun before marriage. The ―ideal‖ American woman took on a variety of characteristics during this time, ranging from girlish to patriotic to maternal. The younger ―girl‖ variety—Flagg‘s coquette, or the flapper, for example—embodied both romance and consumption. Interestingly, none of the phases of the ―ideal‖ woman that Kitch identifies look much like the cultural constructs scholars have used to analyze the period—the True

Woman and the New Woman. Instead, as a phase, each version of the ideal is a slice of time in a woman‘s life (girl, young adult, war wife, new mother), revealing only a glimpse of her identity. And as an ―ideal,‖ little attempt is made toward a portrayal of the ―average‖ or ―real‖ woman‘s life. Instead, the values of romance, home, and consumption were used to signify appropriate goals for women and to emphasize a personal, nonpolitical path toward equality. For a culture shaken by feminism, socialism, scandals over trusts, and a world war, the models ―romance, home, and consumption‖ popularized and spread by the magazine industry represented stability, tradition, and normalcy. The values of ―romance, home, and consumption‖ were also used as a tool to indoctrinate immigrants and the poor into the new nonpolitical consumer-oriented American identity. Female magazine writers understood the danger of these representations. They also recognized the unique opportunity magazines provided for reaching women whose wordviews had been shaped by these very representations. Dorothy Parker, for example, used Vogue—the primary fashion and elite culture magazine of the time—as a venue to critique the ways standards of beauty constrict women‘s choices and limit their means of self-expression. When she published in the Ladies’ Home Journal, however, she shaped her critique for a new audience, using humor to critique domesticity. In her study of women in America, Nancy Woolworth concludes that by the 1920s, modernity for women had successfully been ―translated‖ by magazines into romance, home, and consumption. Carolyn Kitch concurs, claiming that the rhetoric of the women‘s rights movement of the early twentieth century had by the late 1920s shifted toward the ways a woman could be a ―better wife, mother, and shopper‖—the New Woman was now a ―domesticated flapper‖ (8). Women‘s fight for freedoms—political, sexual, and personal—had been co-opted and reduced to the freedom to consume, ostensibly for the betterment of one‘s family. Upwardly-ambitious lower and middle class men and women were the target audience for magazine rhetoric about how the ideal woman looks and behaves, what she cares about, and how she could best ―succeed‖ in life. In magazine advertisements, women were pictured on shopping trips, buying packaged foods for the baby, razors for the husband, and Arco Wand Vacuum Cleaners for themselves. No longer reifying the submissive, pious True Woman, these models emphasized the value of domesticity as a modern phenomenon linked to a woman‘s role as companion and consumer. Female magazine writers during this period turn these models on their heads. Their works appear in the same magazines—at times even on the

18 same page—as texts that glorified dismissive, restrictive representations of women. Women often used these venues to present direct challenges to those representations while also constructing a professional, independent identity for themselves as writers. The primary goal of this study is to identify a set of strategies employed by American women writers at the outset of their magazine-writing careers to challenge and rewrite hegemonic social constructions of womanhood generally and of authorial identity specifically. A second goal is to contribute a better understanding of the vexed relationships between these writers‘ narratives and the context in which they appeared. This study participates in conversations about women‘s writing, the construction of public identity, and periodical culture in hopes of expanding our understanding of the modernist moment. While Ferber, Parker, Stein, and Dunbar-Nelson may not have read each other‘s work, they did share overlapping audiences and concerns. It is the strategies they developed both use and challenge ideological structures of class, gender, and ethnic identity that I wish to highlight in this study. Chapter one, ―Business and Domesticity in Edna Ferber‘s Emma McChesney Series,‖ argues that Ferber‘s remarkable protagonist propelled her into a culture war over the image and place of American women in mainstream culture in the 1910s. Analysis of these stories reveals a writer strategizing to find a voice for her experience of Jewish-American women‘s modernity. Ferber‘s protagonist, a divorced, Irish traveling saleswoman with a teenage son, found an uneasy venue in the conservative but popular American Magazine and Cosmopolitan. With each word challenging patriarchy, Ferber risked isolating her audience or losing the paycheck that supported her, since popular magazines were one of the few venues that paid for women‘s short stories. Ferber uses the popular rhetoric of American business to bring the domestic and female working worlds together. The narrative tension she embodied in her character‘s vacillation between domestic and business discourse made her critique both popular and publishable. In chapter two, ―Representations of Women in Dorothy Parker‘s Early Magazine Work,‖ I analyze the relationship between Dorothy Parker‘s fictional sketches and poems and her publication venues, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. I argue that Parker employs the magazine‘s domestic ideology to critique the choices these magazines offer to women. Parker‘s hyperbole and irony mimicked images of women presented in the advertising, fiction, and editorials in the magazines. By critiquing their available roles, Parker uses humor to ask women to consider alternative relationships to dominant gender ideologies. She was able to

19 make this critique because the humor and colloquial language of her sketch made it palatable to conservative editors and readers alike. My third chapter, ―Gertrude Stein as Debutante in Vanity Fair and the Little Review,‖ analyzes how two periodicals—Vanity Fair and the Little Review—managed the reception of Gertrude Stein. Close reading of her first appearance in each venue reveals that both magazines used similar techniques to ―package‖ Stein in order to make her work palatable to readers. While it may not be surprising that a popular magazine might need to ―control‖ Stein‘s reception, the Little Review, a literary magazine, used similar techniques to present Stein five years later. Stein made use of her reputation and persistence to place highly experimental modernist works expressing a lesbian‘s experiences in popular and little magazines. Chapter four, ―Alice-Dunbar and Female Authorship in Turn-of-the-Century Popular and African-American Magazines,‖ argues that Dunbar-Nelson‘s early short story and poetry work develops strategies for breaking into the early magazine market at the turn of the century. More reserved than her later political essays against racism and sexism in the United States, the progress she made with her early work conflates romance and passing narratives to critique the racist and sexist ideologies inherent in much of the local color writing circulating even in magazines such as Crisis and Opportunity. Understanding how women negotiated the pressures surrounding the construction of female and authorial identity in the magazine market expands our understanding of early twentieth century literature. Taking up Felski‘s question, modernist scholarship in recent years has increasingly focused on the cultural meaning of competing versions and venues of modernism. The authors in this study provide a useful starting point for understanding the ways in which women magazine writers, an often invisible category of authorship in American literary studies, constructed, situated, and circulated their personal and professional identities.

Chapter One

Business and Domesticity in Edna Ferber‘s Emma McChesney Series

In 1915, at the height of the unprecedented publishing success of her Emma McChesney series, Edna Ferber received an unusual offer from the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. The magazine requested as many stories as she was willing to write, and the contract allowed Ferber to set her own terms and name her own price. However, as Ferber recalls in her autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, she had recently come across a review of the series claiming that Ferber ―in her latest volume of the saga of the travelling saleswoman is evidently keeping Emma McChesney alive with injections of black ink.‖ When the series began, Ferber‘s protagonist was a fiery challenge to romance plots, actively resisting domesticity and romance with spirited business rhetoric. The country‘s readers were quickly hooked. But Ferber turned down Cosmopolitan‘s offer, afraid that ―if I had signed that contract …[I] never would have written a fresh line again in all my life‖ (A Peculiar Treasure 174). In December 1911, American Magazine had published ―Roast Beef Medium,‖ the first Emma McChesney story. Ferber, a young Jewish journalist from Iowa, created a bestseller out of the short story‘s protagonist, a divorced, Irish traveling saleswoman. Readers immediately wanted more. As the sensationally popular series progressed over five years, a significant portion of Ferber‘s readers desperately wanted the McChesney character to adhere to a traditional romantic ending and settle down as a housewife. Popular illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, for example, chided Ferber for her ―hysterical‖ character. Many readers, however, cheered McChesney on and celebrated her defiance of the normative gender roles legitimized by popular magazines in the early twentieth century. Edna Ferber challenged both New Woman and True Woman ideologies by constructing a complex character who could embody the traits Ferber felt were most important to a successful challenge of traditional patriarchal cultural values—business acumen, street smarts, independence, morality, a community of supportive women, and domestic and maternal skills honed not by ―nature‖ but by working for pay. The immediate popularity of the McChesney serialized fiction, I show, reveals a reading audience deeply invested in a cultural debate about the values that defined America, its families, and its businesses. Marriage was the battle line at which the many sides of the 1910s culture war met. Ferber‘s ongoing series plays a cat-and-mouse game with marriage for the McChesney protagonist, reflecting a considerable

21 cultural preoccupation with marriage and its discontents as the Progressive era drew to a close. In negotiating tensions within the popular magazine market (one of the few venues open to female short story writers), Ferber sought to situate her challenge to patriarchal ideologies in magazines that constructed and transmitted those very regulations (because it was profitable to do so). Ferber actively negotiated with editors and with the True Woman and New Woman ideologies promoted and/or popularized by the magazine market. While the McChesney stories were popular, Ferber‘s position of power was complex. She had control over what to publish, since the magazine just wanted more stories to generate profit. As an independent female author, she wished to present a hard-nosed, hard-working female protagonist to resist the supposedly ―natural‖ female traits of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness presented in many other articles and stories in the magazines. Significantly, Ferber also emphasized the importance of a female support community for women. While magazines often portrayed women in communities, such as social clubs, Ferber presents community in a different light. At the same time, Ferber had to negotiate the terrain carefully or risk isolating the very audience and venue that supported her endeavors. Despite its republication by University of Illinois Press in 2001, the central narrative of the McChesney series remains unfamiliar to most readers today: a divorced single mother gets a job as a traveling saleswoman for the Featherloom Petticoat Company and quickly becomes known as the best salesperson on the road. After fifteen years, she has raised her son (from a distance) and become a partner in the business. Her ―hard-working, clear-thinking and sane- acting habits‖ serve her well. Two-thirds of the way through the series, she marries her business partner, T.A. Buck. McChesney is a divorced mother who decides to become a saleswoman rather than accept financial support from her alcoholic ex-husband. In the penultimate story of the series, the narrator sums up how McChesney has achieved success: Women who know the joys and sorrows of a pay envelope do not speak of girls who work as Working Girls…Emma McChesney Buck was no exception to this rule. Her fifteen years of man-size work for a man-size salary in the employ of T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, precluded that. In those days, she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, known from coast to coast as the most successful traveling saleswoman in the business. It was due to her that no feminine clothes-closet was complete without a Featherloom dangling from one hook. During those fifteen years she

had educated her son, Jock McChesney, and made a man of him; she had acquired a broad and deep knowledge of those fascinating and diversified subjects which we lump carelessly under the heading of Human Nature. She was Mrs. T.A. Buck now, wife of the head of the firm, and partner in the most successful skirt manufactory in the country. But the hard-working, clear-thinking and sane-acting habits of those fifteen years still clung. (85) A proponent of simple living, hard work, self-sufficiency and independence, McChesney pushes the boundaries of acceptable roles and behaviors for women throughout the series. Ferber‘s women are typically fiery, independent, and capable, while her men are ineffectual and childish, a schemata her biographer and some scholars attribute to Ferber‘s independent mother and weak father. Ferber‘s McChesney series is undoubtedly a site of contested gender ideologies, but as a regionalist text, Ferber‘s complex project also seeks to identify what is American about America and what is American about American women. Studied in the context of their original publications, the stories reveal a complex gender discourse that early twentieth-century men and women negotiated as they flipped through their monthly magazines in search of leisure, entertainment, and education. American Magazine readers were accustomed to reading stories of young women who relied on men for direction and support. In Ferber‘s McChesney stories, however, readers found a woman driven by a desire for autonomy, independence, and self-worth. Several themes dominate Ferber‘s McChesney stories in American Magazine—home versus work, women‘s control over their sexuality, women‘s expectations and realities (across generations), and women‘s place within a business and advertising-oriented, commodity-driven consumer marketplace. Ferber‘s stories offer readers a more complex image of womanhood than the traditional path of True Womanhood or of the seemingly more feminist New Woman. Ferber‘s fiction is proof that Ferber found these available images unsatisfying; she constructed an identity through McChesney that could leave room for the ―average‖ middle class reader to re-imagine her possibilities while still meeting the very real demands of her everyday life. This construction relies on women‘s opportunities to make independent moral decisions and to act on them, to find community outside the home, and to work for pay. These traits show Ferber responding to modernity by rewriting the available roles for women in strategic ways. Specifically, Ferber used the increasingly popular rhetoric of American business to control and engage with potentially

23 domestic situations. In so doing, she shaped her own identity as a young, female, Jewish writer in the fiercely competitive New York magazine market. An incident early in the first McChesney story, ―Roast Beef, Medium‖ illustrates the complex and seemingly contradictory layers of gender identity that Ferber negotiates using business rhetoric. Ferber‘s forward to the series details McChesney‘s consumption of a meal and connects it to her life philosophy. In this forward, Ferber constructs an extended metaphor: a woman‘s life is like a travelling salesman‘s dinner options. This unusual metaphor displaces traditionally feminine language (morals, dining, food choices) by situating the metaphor in the life of a business man. ―Seated at Life‘s Dining Table,‖ the narrator begins, ―with the Menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrees…though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe, and sane, and sure‖ (xxix). The story itself opens by continuing this metaphor for the traveling salesperson‘s life. The young salesperson must take a journey ―into formidable jungles of breaded veal chops…over hills of corned-beef hash, across shaking quagmires of veal glace…until weary, digestion shattered, complexion gone, he reaches the safe haven of roast beef, medium.‖ After much experience, our protagonist has reached this safe haven. She is capable of turning away the exotic, the fancy, the alluring in life. She accomplishes this journey and is never tempted by the ―the other stuff‖ because ―sooner or later it will turn on you and ruin your moral digestion.‖ ―Roast beef, medium‖ uses a business man‘s life to express the tension between a feminist identity and a domestic one. This image also emphasizes the dangers of ―the alluring in life.‖ For while McChesney breaks new boundaries each day she is working and riding the rails, she has formidable challenges to overcome, usually posed by men. Understanding which discourse and location is ―safe, sane, and sure‖ is key to female survival in the text. This example also introduces Ferber‘s frequent use of domestic images (such as ―roast beef‖ or ―petticoats‖) alongside the male domain of business, making her challenges to traditional domesticity more complex but also more popular. Ferber‘s narrative tactics were immensely successful, and she remained a bestselling fiction writer for most of her adult life, turning out over a dozen novels, nine plays, nine story collections, and a couple of autobiographies. More than twenty-five films were based on her works during her lifetime, although she is now best known for her later work, including her 1926 novel Showboat, which was turned into a popular Broadway musical, her 1952 Giant, the basis for the James Dean film of the same name, and her 1958 Ice Palace, the novel that swayed

24 public opinion toward accepting Alaskan statehood. While she was studious about her research, each of these now classic novels was based on Ferber‘s uncanny ability to imagine American landscapes and psyches without firsthand experience. Early in her career, a young reporter looking to support herself and her family after her father‘s death in 1909, Ferber struggled with her role as a single, Jewish working woman. She didn‘t want to work in the factories or department stores commonly available to single women, but she was turned down by the Chicago Tribune because they didn‘t ―use women.‖ In her free time, Ferber wrote short stories that reconcile sentimental and realist traditions. When Ferber sent her short story ―Roast Beef, Medium‖ to American Magazine in 1911, she could not have known that the story‘s protagonist would shape her career and reputation for years to come. After all, two of Ferber‘s early stories—―The Frog and the Puddle‖ and ―The Man Who Came Back: The Story of an Ex-con and a Waitress‖—were published by American Magazine that same year without causing any kind of splash. Ferber was working on a short story about a janitor when ―Roast Beef, Medium‖ turned Ferber and her protagonist, Emma McChesney, into overnight successes. When American Magazine quickly asked for more ―Emma McChesney‖ stories after the wild success of ―Roast Beef, Medium,‖ she wasn‘t sure she had anything more to say about her protagonist, a thirty-six year old traveling saleswoman. Ferber, the middle-class daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish shopkeeper and a German-Jewish, overbearing mother, had no direct experience as the unusual figure of a traveling saleswoman. However, the prolific McChesney stories to follow ―Roast Beef, Medium‖ are tribute to Ferber‘s desire to disrupt the traditional models of womanhood available to herself and her readers. Her character‘s fiery self-reliance and fast-talking attitude are more than just a female version of the self-made man. When a competitor tells her, ―Emma McChesney, you ought to have been born a man. With that head on a man‘s shoulders, you could put us out of business,‖ she quickly replies, ―I could do it anyway‖ (199). When her son tells her a run-down hotel is no place for a lady, McChesney retorts ―Any place in the world is the place for a lady, Jock‖ (67). There is no ―luck‖ involved in McChesney‘s success. It is her superiority in business and life, her ability to best any man who crosses her path, and her support community of women, that lead readers to cheer for her success. Early twentieth century readers of the Emma McChesney stories were delighted not only by her uncanny sense of place, but also by the ways Ferber is able to bring feminist aspirations and an appreciation of sentimental, domestic values into dialogue with one another. One story begins,

Some one—probably one of those French men whose life job is was to make epigrams— once said that there are but two kinds of women: good women, and bad women. Ever since then problem playwrights have been putting that fiction into the mouths of wronged husbands and building their ―big scene‖ around it. But don‘t you believe it. There are four kinds: good women, bad women, good bad women, and bad good women. And the worst of these is the last. This should be a story of all four kinds, and when it is finished I defy you to discover which is which. (107) Acknowledging the complexity of women‘s lives and the restrictive sets of values associated with each ―type‖ of woman‖ by men and fiction-writers, Ferber presents readers with a series of types who could be traditional, or feminist, or both. All of Ferber‘s stories sketch a sense of the freedom and independence offered by open access to the public sphere, but this captivating utopia is scattered with warnings about the loss and pain that mar such freedom. A hybrid identity, readers were meant to understand, is not seamlessly created and lived. A product of her age, Ferber creates stories that celebrate the possibilities opened for women by consumer society and the growing fields of business while valuing some of the traditional constructs of gender ideas that were important to her readers. Ferber wants to resist ideologies promoted by magazine culture that claimed women have no economic and socio-cultural value beyond the private sphere. Her texts reflect her personal philosophy that women with outside interests love their home and family, while housewives cannot. For many critics, Ferber‘s conservative disregard for women‘s political and club work, overshadows the progressive notes in her early fiction.7 However, Ferber‘s early work accomplishes a hybridism of freedom and fear through an aesthetic of down-home, talky prose, journalistic descriptions of both urban and rural settings, and business-laden rhetoric, often using domestic metaphors to communicate Emma McChesney‘s simple living, self-sacrifice, hard-earned wisdom, and progressive worldview. As a serialized story, Ferber‘s text was always already a negotiation between editors and readers‘ expectations, the context of the magazine pages and content, and her own desire to challenge hegemonic constructions of womanhood generally and professional women‘s identities specifically. Ferber‘s strategies of negotiation are an example of an important phenomenon of the 1910s, what Patterson terms ―an ethic of profitable exchange‖—female authors maintaining

7 In a New York Times Magazine interview in 1915, for example, Ferber says, ―I have no sympathy with the restless woman, the woman who takes time from her household duties to do something absolutely worthless.‖ (qtd in Ferber: Edna Ferber and her Circle, a Biography 410).

26 an equilibrium between their employment by mass market magazines and their personal and literary ideals, which were often in opposition to the goals of those magazines (10). To keep her negotiations active, Ferber constructs her series to rely on month-to-month drama. The narrative tension Ferber created entertained readers cheering for McChesney‘s independence as well as those readers clucking their tongues at the brazen saleswoman, eagerly hoping she would settle down and live the traditional life represented in the majority of American Magazine’s content. Theodore Roosevelt, an avid reader of the McChesney stories, wrote to Ferber, calling himself ―hopelessly sentimental,‖ as his ―only objection to the last twelve pages is that I would have liked somehow to see…poor Emma McChesney at last have the chance herself to marry somebody decent with whom she was in love‖ (Rodgers xiii). American Magazine used Roosevelt‘s appeals to Ferber as advertising fodder, adding fuel to the cultural fire her stories stoked. Creating possibilities for each outcome for McChesney was crucial to the series‘ strategic project: drawing readers into a monthly drama in order to unsettle popular constructions of female passivity and dependence. My own analysis is motivated by the desire to question the ways female authors critiqued the very ideologies promoted by the periodicals they relied on for publication and payment. The immense popularity of the Emma McChesney character led Ferber to write nearly two dozen McChesney stories, first published in American Magazine and Cosmopolitan and then collected in three volumes—Roast Beef, Medium (1913), Personality Plus (1914), and Emma McChesney & Co (1915). In 1915, the Broadway hit based on the series, Our Mrs. McChesney, starring Ethel Berrymore, ran for 152 performances. With the McChesney series, Ferber defines her work against stereotypes and models of womanhood widely available in popular culture, especially the True Woman by using the typically male discourse of business to communicate her ideas. Ferber, a single writer with a desire to work, also wanted to rewrite the domestic marriage discourse and to shape a mixed-gender reading base that accepted her new vision against what she saw as the damaging effects of domestic ideologies. Analysis of her work shows that Ferber‘s magazine writing was trying hard to shape her own authorial identity and a potentially subversive construction of female identity at a time when domestic fiction and advertising saturated the popular magazine marketplace. A March 1914 contest in American Magazine illustrates how deeply saturated even mixed-gender magazines were with the idea that a successful woman is a happily married

27 woman. In an essay contest titled ―What I Am Most Afraid Of,‖ the first prize winner feels the fear ―that I shall be tempted to leave it all and go out from my home and make a place for myself, where peace and quiet will be mine…—the fear that, after all these years of endurance I shall fail.‖ Second place was ―She‘s Afraid of Being an Old Maid.‖ The writer wants to know ―why I am denied the privilege of a home, husband and children of my own,‖ and later admits, ―I wouldn‘t feel such a strong dread if I had money.‖ The loving wife‘s greatest fear is that she will leave her marriage to ―make a place for myself.‖ The single woman‘s greatest fear is having no ―husband and children of my own‖ because that means having no money. The prize-winning essays illustrate the depths of anxiety women felt about being unable to live up to available models of womanhood. Ferber presents women with a model for challenging these constructions. In Ferber‘s model, the housewife is encouraged to ―make a place‖ for herself, and the single woman is given opportunities to join the professional workforce to earn a paycheck that would guarantee she didn‘t have to sacrifice her independence for the monetary ―privilege of a home.‖ Published alongside content such as the essay contest, Ferber‘s stories directly confront the very domesticity promoted by the male copywriters, editors, and advertisers in the magazines.8 Ferber knew that this market, with all its flaws, could potentially garner her more than a million eager readers and, just as importantly, could financially support her desire for independence. The popularity of magazines allowed Ferber to use the controversy stirred by McChesney to speak her mind about women in general, constructing marriage as one of many options (rather than a dictate) for women while also strongly advocating paid work. In this way, Ferber uses business rhetoric to present a challenge to the most popular and pervasive structure of gendered identity in the 1910s while also offering a transformative model—the single, independent working mother who rises to ownership of a company. Ferber‘s desire to resist the patriarchal ideologies of marriage and domesticity, and her fiery determination to express that resistance through fiction, derive in part from her own experiences as a young Jewish woman growing up in the anti-Semitic town of Ottumwa, Iowa at

8 While the audience for American Magazine included both men and women, most contributors during this period were men, or were identified only by initials, a strategy designed to disguise the large number of male writers and appease women who were beginning to call for more female writers and contributors. For example, in the April 1913 issue, in which Ferber published ―In the Absence of the Agent,‖ Ferber is the only female contributor with the exception of two contest winners‘ brief essays.

28 the turn of the century.9 Ferber recalled, ―My other cheek was all worn out long before I grew up.‖ When the family finally moved to away from Ottumwa, her father‘s health and business failed. Ferber‘s mother Julia took over the dry goods business, running it successfully for fifteen years, though shunned by a community unable to accept a working woman. Ferber learned to see men as weak impediments to success, marriage a burden. Even unmarried, however, Ferber experienced discrimination as a woman. Unable to afford college, Ferber began working at sixteen, but when she applied for a job at the Chicago Tribune, she was told they didn‘t ―use women.‖ During WWI, Ferber tried to travel to France for the Red Cross but was turned down by the government: her father was born in Hungary. As an advocate for productive work for women, Ferber later sought to legitimate women‘s contributions to the workforce as an alternative to marriage and to keep her own working position as an unmarried, Jewish writer of magazine fiction for some of the top selling monthlies in the country. Despite the profusion of scholarship about New Woman fiction and its place in early twentieth century fiction, few scholars have read popular women‘s magazine fiction in terms of its discursive relationship to the dominant ideologies circulating in the mass media in the 1910s. Most scholarship on Ferber, for example, tends to deal primarily with the rewriting of Jewish womanhood in her semi-autobiographical The Treasure Chest and her regionalist brand of feminism, both of which are important and critical components of her career. My reading of Ferber‘s popular Emma McChesney series, however, aims to reinvigorate these discussions by considering how Ferber used business rhetoric as a strategy to both participate in and oppose the dominant ideologies of womanhood in the popular magazine press. The meaning of texts like Ferber‘s stories vary depending on the contexts in which they appear (evidenced by the ―My Greatest Fear‖ essays) so an analysis of those contexts is significant. The reason the McChesney series so quickly launched Ferber‘s professional career lies with her desire to produce work that challenges hegemonic gender ideologies and expectations in a venue that embodied those very expectations. To do so, Ferber was unable to ignore the contradictions such work brought to the

9 Scholars have noted that Ferber‘s commitment to ambitious female characters stemmed from her experiences specifically as a Jewish woman. Diane Lichetenstein has observed that Ferber‘s fiction imagines America itself as Jewish. Being a woman, like being a Jew, is finally empowering in Ferber‘s work, as women and Jews needed to be smarter, stronger, and more fearless than men and Gentiles to survive in the world (132). Christopher Wilson has studied the ways Ferber‘s work as a teenaged reporter in Wisconsin made her prematurely old, ―hard-boiled and masculine‖ (67). Both Wilson and Carol Batker have complicated Ferber‘s commitment to New Woman characters by investigating her attempts to represent working-class women from an affluent, semi-corporate position. Suzzane Gittleman has noted that Ferber‘s denial of traditional ideals of femininity originates in Progressive Era reforms.

29 surface. Instead, she played them out over the monthly series. My analysis thus begins with the assumption that the tensions within Ferber‘s stories represent larger tensions in the United States leading up to WWI. The protaganist‘s problematic relationship to the institution of marriage and the discourse of True Womanhood parallels Ferber‘s own relationship to conservative gender ideologies. At the same time, Ferber did not see the New Woman as a satisfactory alternative. The emphasis on a domestic political agenda and the strategy of using club work as a means to achieve political ends did not mesh with Ferber‘s beliefs about the inefficacy of club work as a means to social change. This becomes clear in a scene during a period in which McChesney was unemployed, as she tries to make friends with some club woman as an outlet for intellectual energy: There were dinners—long, heavy, correct dinners. Emma, very well dressed, bright-eyed, alert, intelligent, vital, became very popular at these affairs…And if anyone as thoroughly alive as [McChesney] could have been bored to extinction by anything, then those dinners would have accomplished the deadly work. (Emma McChesney and Company 58) This description of the very social events that made up typical middle or upper class female society reveal the inadequacy of ―correct‖ social interactions for female community-building. Both the New Woman and the True Woman ideologies subscribed to these social events, if for different purposes. Of the women in attendance, McChesney says, ―They all seem to ‗go in‘ for something—votes or charity or dancing or social service, or something—even the girls. And they all sounded so amateurish, so untrained, so unprepared, yet they seemed to be dreadfully in earnest‖ (58). Here, Ferber points out what makes the club woman gatherings inefficient—not lack of desire or ambition, but lack of real-world experience. Trapped in the private sphere by social regulations, the women are forced to flounder in their inexperience. Pointing out this deficiency, Ferber highlights the effects of inequality. She offers a solution: paid work. The course of Progressive Era feminism in the early twentieth century forced Ferber to be careful in her challenges. An understanding of this wave of feminism reveals that Ferber‘s project was both necessary and unimaginably difficult. In the 1910s, mass media helped to redefine the collective feminism of the early 1900s into the individual hedonism of the twenties. Nancy Woloch concludes that by the 1920s, modernity for women had been ―translated‖ by magazines such as these into romance, home, and consumption. Carolyn Kitch concurs, claiming

30 that the rhetoric of the women‘s rights movement of the early twentieth century had by the late 1920s shifted toward the ways a woman could be a ―better wife, mother, and shopper‖ the New Woman was now a ―domesticated flapper‖ (183).10 Emma McChesney is, in fact, a wife, mother and shopper. However, she succeeds despite these roles, not because of them. And her success relies heavily on her ability to have an intellectually challenging job. American Magazine and Cosmopolitan, Ferber‘s venues for the McChesney series, had a diverse audience who would have had mixed reactions to such a setup. Readers attracted by the ten-cent monthly ranged geographically from the city to the farm and included men, women, and children, natives and immigrants, poor, middle, and upper-middle-class.11 Much of the content of these magazines addressed this diversity by maintaining conservative values that emphasize marriage and family as the primary goal for women. Ferber published the first two-thirds of her Emma McChesney series in American Magazine, a ten-cent monthly magazine directed at a mixed-gender, middle class audience. To help us understand the context in which Ferber‘s stories were read, it is necessary to understand the framework provided by the magazine. The magazine began its life as Leslie’s Monthly Magazine, but was purchased in 1906 by a dissatisfied group of McClure‘s writer and editors, including Ida Tarbell. Renaming it American Magazine, the group‘s goal was to create a ―journal of uplift, looking for the hopeful as well as the underside of society‖ (Tebbel 117). The result was a magazine whose content ranged from light-hearted fiction and essay contests to articles about scientific management and regular journalistic features on social inequities such as unjust imprisonment, lynching, and illegal money trusts. These ten-cent monthlies did not necessarily give the impression that consumption could be either radical or feminized; their primary concern was, after all, securing advertising dollars. Mass-circulation magazines relied for their success on

10 Cultural historian and critic Carolyn Kitch argues that redefinitions of gender identities were continually constructed and articulated in the media in the period 1900-1920. The most relevant of these redefinitions were: from working/college woman to flapper girl; from collective movements to personal style; from voting to spending; from sexuality to sexy silliness. 11 For more information on the relationship between magazines and consumerism, see Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) and see George H. Douglas. The Smart Magazines: Fifty Years of Literary Revelry and High Jinks (Hamden: Archon Books, 1991). Much of the information about target audience can also be gleaned from the magazine‘s advertising. American Magazine included advertisements aimed at women and men, but ran no ads for luxury items. Common advertisers included BVD Undershirts, Fairy Soap, Billiard Tables, Mullin‘s Food for Babies, Old Towne Canoes, Smith and Wesson, Welch‘s, and Burpee‘s Seeds.

31 delivering consumers, especially female consumers, to advertisers. 12 However, Barbara Green argues that many early twentieth century feminists/modernists considered ―feminist consumption as a particularly salient, and potentially radical, aspect of women‘s experience of modernity,‖ bringing together economics, physical appetite, and desire (Green 223). Perhaps because of these linkages, the idea of the consuming woman, as Felski argues, also signaled for many the feminization and irrationality of modernity. The magazines of the period, however, are a useful discursive space to study, because of the ways magazines represented a shift in the public/private divide—much like consumer culture itself. Here, meanings of femininity were created, contested, and sometimes reified. Carolyn Kitch argues, ―both the department store and the mass circulation magazine were sites of identity formation for Americans of various classes‖ (20). However, in her study of the New Woman, Ann Heilmann cautions that we can‘t use magazines as though they are a direct window into the past, giving us the historical or ―real‖ New Woman in unmediated fashion (New Woman Hybridities). Likewise, we must be careful not to assume any gender identity can be understood as unmediated. Because of the outpouring of printed discourse about the nature and effect of the ―New Woman‖ beginning in the 1890s, this identity/image in particular was inextricably bound with the press and must be studied together in that context. American Magazine’s illustrations, advertising, fiction, editorials, advice columns, poems and essay contests helped to construct, disseminate, and legitimate models of American womanhood to the thousands of men and women who read the magazine.13

12 For more information on the relationship between magazines and consumerism, see Helen Damon-Moore. Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) and see George H. Douglas. The Smart Magazines: Fifty Years of Literary Revelry and High Jinks. (Hamden: Archon Books, 1991). Much of the information about target audience can also be gleaned from the magazine‘s advertising. American Magazine included advertisements aimed at women and men, but ran no ads for luxury items. Common advertisers included BVD Undershirts, Fairy Soap, Billiard Tables, Mullin‘s Food for Babies, Old Towne Canoes, Smith and Wesson, Welch‘s, and Burpee‘s Seeds. 13 The advertisers are trying to reach a mixed-gender audience, since American Magazine, unlike its more successful contemporaries, was always directed at a large ―general‖ audience. The solutions to all of life‘s problems, the ads claim, can be found through consumption. In this issue, one full-page advertisement encourages women to ―Say Yes! To California‖ by taking the Golden State Limited train. The illustration shows the unusual image of a woman on horseback, unaccompanied by a man. A full-page ad for ―Fairy Soap‖ appeals to mothers with the question ―Have you a little fairy in your home?‖—―Health depends largely upon cleanliness; the daily bath is worth more than all kinds of medicine‖ (Jan 1912, 2), appealing to reform-minded efforts toward improved sanitation and against patent medicines. Another full-page ad, however, targets men whose ―nerve health‖ is deficient and in need of ―the remarkable food-tonic elements of Sanatogen‖ (4). While the Sanatogen ad says it is for ―men and women,‖ each of the series of full-page advertisements for Sanatogen (nearly every month in American Magazine) is illustrated in a way that directs the ad toward men. Allowing men to acknowledge a lack of ―necessary vitality‖ caused by ―the ravages of overwork, worry, or illness‖ sends dual messages—men must be vital and healthy to be

As an ideological vehicle and the magazine‘s most popular feature, the fiction published by the magazines can best unpack what models of womanhood were represented.14 Although most of the authors were men, the plotlines in American Magazine fiction were equally likely to follow fishermen as girls playing in a farmyard. Jennifer Scanlon argues in Inarticulate Longings, a study of Ladies Home Journal, that as scholars began to equate ―mass‖ media with a white, middle class, hegemonic, formulaic view of the world, they stopped investigating its complexities. Recently, more scholars have focused their efforts on understanding the complexity and scope of magazine fiction from this era. Magazine fiction, Scanlon argues, not only supports and undermines traditional womanhood, femininity, and domesticity but also reveals the ―inarticulate longings‖ of women for personal autonomy, economic independence, intimacy, sensuality, self-worth, and social recognition. Therefore, she argues for the ―value of using artifacts of popular culture to examine cultural definitions of womanhood‖ (138). In this complex discursive and ideological environment, Edna Ferber‘s protagonist, a fictional construction that challenged and complicated the domestic plot—took hold of readers‘ intellects and their hearts. The ability to balance her challenges to domestic and New Woman ideologies with a tense plotline was vital to Ferber‘s career, as she was largely dependent on magazine editors for publication opportunities. Like many of her contemporaries, Ferber was unhappy at times with the money-driven print culture of magazines. However, she was also invested in the mass media, both to support herself financially and to foster a receptive reading audience. Therefore, she could not wholly disregard periodical culture, even as she found fault with the values it

normal; and, it is okay to admit mental ―nerve‖ weakness so long as you are actively working toward a solution. The ―crisis of masculinity‖ had yet to take hold of the American imagination in the early 1910s, but its roots may be seen in these early advertisements. Advertisements directed at men in this issue also include roofing supplies, revolvers, a business proposal (which the advertiser wants to make ―man to man‖), and Ivory soap—a soap for athletes (124). To be a man in this world requires a lot—the ability to keep up with repairs, to bring home a manly salary, protect the family, and to stay clean and athletic. 14 For example, in ―An Interlocutory Decree‖ (January 1913), a sailor tells the story of another sailor‘s wife who sometimes came on trips with the crew. She claimed to have fallen out of love with her husband in favor of another sailor. In the end, after a shipwreck in which both men die trying to save her, the woman seems to have changed her mind, scorning the new love in favor of her husband—the narrator makes it clear that the woman‘s indecisiveness is a persistent and negative womanly trait. In another story from the same issue, ―The Little Lady of the New,‖ a man visiting China during a period of revolution ―saves‖ a young Chinese girl whose family has expelled her. He has previously been the girl‘s professor, and in a series of letters to a friend at home, the narrator explains how he fell for the girl, had sex with her, and then ―saved‖ her again after she tried to commit suicide by offering to marry her. In both of these stories, the woman is fickle, at times uncaring, and always under the control of a man. Still, the Chinese girl‘s attempted suicide and the sailor‘s wife‘s decision to leave her husband both provide a sense of women‘s agency and control over their lives.

33 promoted. As a writer, Ferber was committed to representing American women as dignified, strong, capable, and independent, particularly so when they aren‘t held back by men. Emma McChesney is a spokesperson for these views. In the story that launched Ferber‘s career, ―Roast Beef Medium,‖ published in American Magazine, McChesney encounters a young man who reminds her of her son. The young man makes an unwanted advance, which McChesney rejects before launching into a long monologue about the fate of the traveling man‘s wife. What I‘ve got to say to you isn‘t so much for your sake, as for your wife‘s. I was married when I was eighteen, and stayed married eight years. I‘ve had my divorce ten years, and my boy is seventeen years old. Figure it out. How old is Ann?...Just because I‘m a traveling man it doesn‘t follow that I‘ve forgotten the Bess feeling. (24) The scene quickly highlights the values that define our protagonist. She is a no-nonsense business ―man‖ who believes in simple living. Identifying herself as a ―travelling man‖ unsettles fixed categories and characteristics of sex and gender. She emphasizes the responsibility a husband has as a companion to his wife. Resisting the typical middle-class working woman categories, Ferber‘s protagonist is neither a woman killing time before marriage nor a woman working out of dire economic necessity. Her protagonist is neither young nor, importantly, naïve. And rather than being engaged or married at story‘s end, the ―heroine‖ is instead lecturing to an impudent young salesman about how and why he should treat his young bride more compassionately. This unsettles traditional models of female passivity and female responsibility for nurturing a safe, moral space at home for her husband. In the story that launched her career, Ferber is circulating new personal and professional identities for herself, her characters, and her readers. This first story also reveals to readers that McChesney is divorced but refused support from her ex-husband. Had she accepted support, she would not need to work. She is a mother, but only from a distance, a role Ferber had to justify to conservative readers later. Ferber also uses this opening scene to make the McChesney character acceptable to her mixed-gender, middle class audience. Rejecting the man‘s kiss, McChesney embodies the kind of sexual restraint that might appease readers worried about a single woman alone on the road—in fact, the narrator reveals that one of the first rules on the road is to ―learn to congeal men‘s advances.‖ Her first mention of marriage is in terms of her divorce, and her second mention of marriage is an indictment of the young man‘s lack of responsibility and compassion toward his wife. Her

34 very use of the words ―my divorce‖ invokes a cultural debate about the morality of divorce, the causes of divorce, and ways to stop what seemed to many to be a frightening and dangerous liberalism in the court system. In reality, the advertising-driven consumer culture, which encouraged conspicuous consumption likely influenced the high number of divorces. Both the Lynds‘ study of Middletown and Elaine Tyler May‘s study of marriage and divorce in Post- Victorian America found that issues surrounding money became more prevalent in divorce cases during this period.15 As one judge put it, ―Modern couples are money conscious, whether rich or poor‖ (May 139). As a mother, Ferber‘s protagonist is careful not to allow her son Jock to lose sight of the value of working for one‘s paycheck, potentially in response to this culture of conspicuous consumption. In one scene, McChesney sees her son flirting with a young salesgirl in a department store. She asks him how much spending money she‘s been providing him with. He replies, ―Well, quite a lot. But a fellow‘s got to have money to keep up appearances. A lot of fellows in my crowd have more than I. There are clothes, and tobacco, and then flowers, and cabs for the skirts—girls, I mean, and—‖ (72). She interrupts him: From where I‘m sitting I can see that in you there is the making of a first-class cad. That‘s no pleasant thing for a mother to realize. Now don‘t interrupt me. I‘m going to be chairman, speaker, program, and ways-and-means committee of this meeting. Jock, I got my divorce from your father ten years ago. Now, I‘m not going to say anything about him. Just this one thing. You‘re not going to follow in his footsteps, Kid. Here, Ferber grafts business rhetoric onto a common domestic scene, proving that work experience serves to improve a woman‘s life in all other areas. She denies her son‘s claim that conspicuous consumption is important in male/female relationships, revealing that this assumption was part of the reason for her divorce. Here, she performs the role of father, taking up a position against consumption and using ―tough love‖ to communicate her point. Using the male model of parenthood and the male language of business, McChesney puts her son in his place. Nonetheless, divorce was generally seen as a woman‘s fault, and McChesney‘s words confirm that the divorce was to her benefit. Ferber is careful not to imply McChesney is unaware

20. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Hartcourt, Brace, and Co., 1937); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

35 of the benefits of marriage, however. She tells the young salesman in her opening story, ―I‘d give last week‘s commissions if there was some one to whom I had the right to say: ‗Henry, will you get up and get me a hot-water bag for my neuralgia? It‘s something awful‘‖ (24 my italics).16 Again using the language of business (―last week‘s commissions‖), Ferber‘s text presents marriage as contract in which both parties have rights—including the right to companionship, and the right to divorce when the contract has been broken. The marriages the protagonist has experienced and observed represent a break from the image of the fulfilling marriage presented in the pages of Cosmopolitan and American Magazine, and she is training her son according to her own model of marriage. Here, Ferber uses business rhetoric to challenge the efficacy of the traditional romance plot. The tension evident in Ferber‘s evaluation of marriage, which plays itself out in the McChesney series, differs from the discussions about marriage in other sections of the popular magazines. An analysis of these differences shows the extent to which Ferber‘s monthly series was in constant tension with the magazine‘s editors, readers, and content. In one 1914 edition of American Magazine, the Editor‘s Table advertises a story in which a young woman ―goes to a country fair in the morning, heart-whole and fancy-free, and comes home at night engaged to a man who never saw her before.‖ Readers are assured the young woman never regrets having fallen in love. In the illustrated humor column ―Why They Parted,‖ James Montgomery Flagg explains reasons for divorce: ―I‘ll have to divorce you! said Beulah M‘Gee, / We‘ve little in common of late--/ Of steps in the Tango you know thirty-three, / While I know two hundred and eight!‖ Within the same magazine covers, the fiction promises love at first sight, nonfiction promises true love if a woman compromises, and the humor column represents women as responsible for the failures of marriages. Even the seemingly conservative fiction in magazines, however, can be read as a site of potentially subversive meaning-making. As Jennifer Scanlon writes, many stories, even those with predictable plotlines ―promise happy lives through traditional means, but expose those means—and those ends—as less than satisfying for women‖ (Scanlon 139). Despite potential acknowledgment of women‘s dissatisfaction, the denunciation

21. As McChesney claimed earlier in the series, ―I was so disgusted that if some one had called me up on the ‗phone and said, ‗Hullo, Mrs. McChesney! Will you marry me?‘ I‘d have said: ‗Yes. Who is this?‘‖ (217). McChesney‘s statement that women marry to escape difficult lives foregrounds Ferber‘s own concern with reception and with audience. In this venue, vilification of marriage would be rejected, but an acknowledgment that marriage and love are not always entwined was embraced.

36 of women who divorced and praise for women who married for life was extensive in print culture throughout the 1910s. Ferber‘s construction of an easy-to-like divorced single working mother disrupts these denunciations of divorced women. When Ida Tarbell, often perceived by readers as a feminist, published a number of articles in American Magazine lamenting the state of marriage in America, her criticism resembled that of many of the contemporary critics of her day. She blamed the trouble on hasty mating, women not taking their domestic duties seriously, and emancipation weakening respect for women‘s natural tasks, such as childbearing. She laments the ―women whose days are spent in trade and professions complacently congratulat[ing] themselves that they at least have lived‖ (Ida Tarbell, ―The Uneasy Woman,‖ American Magazine, January 1912, 262). Tarbell‘s words did not fall on deaf ears, as one letter to the editor made clear. In the letter, a reader writes, ―Through you I am transformed from a commonplace farmer‘s wife into a Woman thinking great thoughts of such women as Miss Tarbell and Jane Addams‖ (―Letter to the Editor,‖ American Magazine, January 1912, 103). Thus, the ―farmer‘s wife‖ has been ―transformed,‖ but the ―great thoughts‖ she has been exposed to merely reinforce common domestic ideologies of the times. Such reassurance, advertisers and editors believed, was necessary at a time when technological and cultural changes led to dramatic questions about a woman‘s place in a world newly defined by consumption and production. Magazine content often reinforced traditional patriarchal, middle-class values using the language of women‘s ―freedom‖ and ―rights.‖ Ferber‘s McChesney series resists these values, claiming that paid work and a secure community of women was the best path to dealing with the technological and cultural changes in the United States. An Irish working woman, that is, is more self-sufficient and productive than the image of white motherhood presented in the pages of magazines. While Emma McChesney‘s ethnic background is never explicitly addressed in the series, there is one moment where it arises. Encountering her business associate, Ted O‘Malley—a ―temperamental Irishman‖—McChesney squirrels out of a tight spot by invoking their shared heritage by addressing him ―as a McChesney to an O‘Malley‖ (49). Irish immigrants were harshly stereotyped in print media in the early twentieth century, and some Irish were subjected to the cruelties of the eugenics movement, which Ferber would have known. Ferber had suffered under stereotypes about Jewish business persons growing up as a Jewish shopkeeper‘s daughter

37 and may have felt that a Jewish name was unassimilable. In giving her protagonist the ethnic prefix ―Mc‖ she nonetheless created a name that hinted at the success and energy of America‘s diverse population without narrowing her potential reading audience. American Magazine’s editors were well aware that immigrants were a part of their reading audience. In a magazine whose goals included ―uplift,‖ upwardly-ambitious immigrants would have been taught the tools of assimilation in its pages, including understanding the ―natural‖ roles of men and women. Even feminist activists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman understood the efficacy of this argument. In her 1903 The Home, Its Work and Influence, she asserted, ―For the home‘s sake, as well as for her own sake, the girl will profit by experience in the working world‖ (271). Like Tarbell, however, Gill stresses the debilitating effects of work after marriage. A woman is confused by trying to follow two contradictory paths, the magazine rhetoric claims, and her reputation and relationships are at risk when she refuses to obey tradition. Ferber‘s divorced working saleswoman challenges the masses on this point, encouraging women with different views to feel proud and safe. When read against contemporaneous magazine accounts of the effects of work and divorce on women‘s lives, Ferber‘s traveling saleswoman protagonist seems at first not to take sides in the war over the nation‘s values. After all, McChesney‘s need to fend off predatory men, her constant travel, her nostalgia for home life, and the son she leaves in the care of boarding houses are linked to her preoccupation with her work—exactly the way that many cultural observers linked work for women to prostitution and bad mothering. In one story, McChesney suffers an illness on the road that requires six-weeks bed rest to overcome, linking the protagonist to claims that working women were susceptible to nervous breakdowns and mental exhaustion. Ferber herself had experience with ―nervous breakdown‖ as a teenager working in Milwaukee, and the incident forced her to return home to live with her parents. Read in this light, the McChesney series seems to be a cautionary tale about the perils of divorce and the perils of work for women. However, when she falls ill, McChesney does not come across as mentally exhausted or nervous. As she is about to pass out, ―Even then there came into Emma McChesney‘s ordinarily well-ordered, alert mind the uncomfortable thought that she was talking nonsense. She made a last effort to order her brain into its usual sane clearness, failed‖ (168). When she awakes, she takes charge of her care, even claiming, ―and if I die and they run my picture in the Dry Goods

Review under the caption, ‗Veteran Traveling Saleswoman Succumbs at Glen Rock,‘ I‘ll haunt the editor.‖ This is not the picture of a woman who has had a nervous breakdown. Instead, she‘s just genuinely sick. McChesney overcomes each peril as it is presented to her. Raising such perils in a serialized magazine story hooked readers, who had to buy a new issue of the magazine and follow the story each month to find out if McChensey‘s life on the road was going to catch up with her. Readers were meant to wonder, can she possibly keep living a man‘s life and still be happy? How will a son raised without his mother turn out? Is McChesney doing the right thing? Will she ever settle down and get married? Although the stories were collected in three bestselling volumes after original magazine publication, Ferber wrote the stories singly, determining the characters‘ fates one month at a time. The success of the McChesney series is a remarkable example of Ferber‘s political influence through her writing in women‘s magazines. American Magazine continually tried to cash in on Ferber‘s influence. In December 1912, the venue announced Ferber‘s January story in a full-page advertisement. In it, editors play on the tensions inherent in the series. A large illustration by James Montgomery Flagg (best known for his WWI ―Uncle Sam Wants You‖ image) shows Emma McChesney, her business partner, and one other male associate. Although the illustration is of a business setting, McChesney clutches a letter from her son to her chest, smiling dreamily. Beneath the title of the advertised story, ―Catching Up with Christmas,‖ is a large print announcement from the editors—―An Emma McChesney story!—which is as vivid a description and as generous a praise as it is possible to give a story—that is, unless you are not fortunate enough to know this woman drummer who has become the most popular character in current fiction‖ (―The American Magazine‘s Biggest Year‖ (advertisement), American Magazine, December 1912, 107 (original emphasis)). In the announcement of the story, editors focus on McChesney‘s personality, calling her ―the wisest, wittiest, finest woman, as well as the slangiest and cleverest.‖ The advertisement continues with an astonishing testimonial: ―In the heat of the campaign, Colonel Roosevelt wrote a characteristic letter to Miss Ferber, part protest, part appeal, and part command that Emma McChesney get married at once!‖ This surprising intervention highlights the high stakes Ferber set with her rebellious saleswoman. Roosevelt himself was a devoted fan of the McChesney series, a fact that emphasizes the mixed gender appeal of Ferber‘s work and of American Magazine. Reportedly, he asked Ferber, when they first met in 1912, ―What are you going to do about Emma McChesney?‖ In a later letter, Roosevelt expressed his dissatisfaction

39 with the McChesney series, specifically with the Personality Plus storyline, which ends with McChesney remaining single and independent. Roosevelt was clearly as committed to Ferber‘s characters as her hundreds of thousands of other readers. While it is clear that Roosevelt is invested in the outcome of the series, there is little in this recorded response that may be characterized as a ―command that Emma McChesney get married at once!‖ as the editorial advertisement in American Magazine claims. Instead, Roosevelt seems to pity ―poor Emma McChesney‖ as if she were simply unlucky in love (like Ferber‘s protagonist in her first published story, ―The Homely Heroine‖) rather than making a conscious decision to stay single, a decision informed by a strong work ethic and a desire for autonomy. Roosevelt desires the ―they lived happily ever after‖ ending, but Ferber continues to make no such promises. Meanwhile, the editors at American Magazine used every available opportunity to play up the controversy inherent in a series about a divorced working mother and continued to profit from the ―most popular character in current fiction.‖ Roosevelt was not the only male ―celebrity‖ to express dissatisfaction with Ferber‘s series. James Montgomery Flagg, the illustrator of Ferber‘s stories for American Magazine, used his allotted space in the magazine to criticize Ferber‘s boldness. Flagg was author of the magazine‘s monthly departments, an illustrated humor column called ―I Should Say So.‖ In an often-quoted passage in his autobiography, Flagg explains his philosophy about women— ―Women should be coquettes. How dull and unfeminine women are who are forthright, good- fellows, good pals, one of the boys, honest, take-it-or-leave-it creatures. Good God! I‘d much rather be with men when I just want good company‖ (175). In the May 1914 issue of American Magazine, Flagg used his ―I Should Say So‖ column to express more precisely how he felt about Edna Ferber and her protagonist with a several pages long illustrated parody, ―Frills and Ednaferberlows.‖ Flagg‘s response to Edna Ferber‘s character reveals an antagonism deeply rooted in the patriarchal ideologies embodied by the popular magazine market, an antagonism likely shared by many American Magazine readers. The parady follows ―Emmer McChesnut‖ on the road as she continually rejects random wedding proposals, smokes cigars, and generally makes a fool of herself in front of men. At the rejection of a man in a hotel restaurant, whom Emmer assumed was proposing to her (a parody of the opening scene of ―Roast Beef, Medium‖) the McChesnut character‘s mind comes ―unhinged‖: ―Old Em was so goldinged mortified she didn‘t know what she was doing. She

40 sprinkled catsup in her hair and crawled under her own chair and bit the rungs till the sap came, and barked like a sea lion! What humiliation! Woof!‖ The model here is of a ―hysterical‖ woman, a common depiction of women who had stepped outside the proper domestic sphere. While disguised as comedy, the storyline—focusing on the woman‘s aggressiveness and manliness—combined with the manly physical features of the character in the illustration (and the very feminine illustration of her son) demonstrates Flagg‘s rejection of the egalitarian principles and values articulated in the McChesney series. A woman‘s place is not in the professional world—she should be a ―coquette,‖ not a business woman. It is not a stretch to imagine McChesnut confined in Flagg‘s next installment by the rest cure. Any woman whose sole desire is not to pursue a felicitous marriage is unnatural, hysterical. When Flagg reads the stories, it is clear that the Feber‘s challenge to True Woman ideologies and traditional patriarchal values overshadowed the romantic marriage plotlines and idealized longing for domesticity that she incorporates throughout her stories. Despite the conservative notes in her fiction, Flagg internalized only the perceived aggressiveness of the character. He seems to have taken personal offense at McChesney‘s constant need to reject the advances of men. In reality, a single urban woman‘s rejection of unknown men was essential to her survival; many women became ―disgraced‖ (read: rape victim; pregnant) or criminal (read: prostitutes) because they were unable to slow the constant flow of advances. At the end of his column, Flagg addresses his parody to mothers—―You who are mothers! Can you not feel for old Em?‖ Flagg‘s statement identifies Emmer‘s primary role as mother, despite the small role of her son ―Jocko‖ in the parody. Also, this address to mothers indicates that Flagg thought women would read and appreciate the parody. Flagg also assumes his readers are familiar enough with the McChesney stories to understand his parody and ambivalent enough to find humor in it. Perhaps many male readers of this mixed-audience magazine would have received the stories in the same way that Flagg appears to have—as an example of an unfeminine character gone too far into a man‘s world. These readers could be reassured by advertisements, editor‘s pages, and other stories in the magazine that more directly reinforced the dominant ideologies of the day. Perhaps while perusing Flagg‘s parody, readers‘ eyes drifted to the other columns on the page—to the left, an ad enticing readers to ―See America‘s Most Primitive Indians…at the Grand Canyon‖; to the right, an ad for a revolver asking for ―a man who is not afraid—who is armed.‖ Reinforcing both an ethnically exclusive

American identity and the role of men as protectors of the home, any potential crisis of masculinity—or of domestic femininity—is again averted. When Flagg‘s parody was published, Edna Ferber was away in Paris. The editors wrote to her, asking whether she would like to respond to Flagg‘s column. Published in October 1914, Ferber‘s letter would be the last piece she sent to American Magazine, despite the editor‘s December 1914 promise that ―New stories by Edna Ferber—the creator of Emma McChesney— in an entirely new vein will be one of the fiction features during the coming year‖ (6). Instead, the McChesney story in the previous September 1914 issue, ―The Self Starter‖—published in the coveted lead story position and accompanied by an expensive full-page color illustration—would be her last fiction contribution to the publication. Her response about Flagg to American Magazine, printed in the ―Office Chat‖ column, is brief enough to quote in full here: Of course you know me well enough to be sure that my first impulse, on reading Flagg‘s fling at me, was to slap right back at him—bing! But I suppose I hadn‘t a typewriter and I can‘t write without one. A pen just cripples me. So I didn‘t do it, though I‘d still love to. But you‘ve no idea how terrifically hard it is to work under these conditions. Why, it can‘t be done. Madness! I had thought of doing an Emma story about him. Have Emma give him a gabby monologue on the treatment of her clothes, wrinkles, shoes and all that. If I could have eleven minutes to myself, away from this yelping Paris, I‘d do it and smile a grim and fiendish smile. Mebbe. (October 1914, 83) The reason for the ―grim and fiendish smile‖ is likely the realization that a professional in the magazine industry, a man with whom she had worked for nearly three years, a reader who worked intimately with her stories, received the work as unwomanly and aggressive. Her efforts toward redefining American womanhood, of constructing a model with the potential to be business-minded, independent, moral, hard-working, and respectable in society, had been rejected. Her response is more of an anti-response, putting aside the possibility of giving Flagg any more attention than she felt he deserved. American Magazine wanted a response; they knew readers were heavily invested in Ferber and her characters. They were so desperate for material from her, in fact, that in the absence of a response, they printed the put-off. While the force of a pervasive heteronormative marriage ideology in the wider culture never convinced Ferber herself to marry, this ideology combined with demand from readers and publishers left Ferber with little choice but to create a marriage plot for her characters in the

McChesney series. After her marriage to T.A. Buck, only McChesney‘s age frees her from the dictate to bear children. Mainstream magazines almost universally shied away from publishing stories with dissenting heroines, preferring the ―pink-cheeked goddesses‖ that Ferber toyed with in one of her first stories, ―The Homely Heroine.‖ In order to break through this barrier, Ferber wrote a son into the McChesney narrative. Glenda Riley has noted that if a New Woman character does have children, it is the necessity of providing for them, generally after abandonment by the father, that motivates the woman to become financially and emotionally independent (6). This is the case for Ferber‘s McChesney protagonist, which dulled the potentially radical edge of the character‘s aspirations just enough to justify American Magazine‘s and Cosmopolitan‘s decision to publish them. McChesney was keenly aware of the demand for her character to get married. She also knew that many female readers wished McChesney to stay single. A single working woman herself, Ferber also played up the controversy over her character when possible to increase her readership. After the first ten McChesney stories (later collected as Roast Beef Medium), Ferber shifted the focus of her stories away from McChesney‘s life on the road. Resolving some of the tension regarding what kind of son such an unusual mother could raise, the next five stories in the series focused on McChesney‘s mothering skills (again narrated vis a vis her business skills) as she introduced her teenage son Jock to the business and convinced him to attend college. Not forgetting her commitment to rewriting the popular magazine discourses about marriage, the final McChesney story to be printed in American Magazine ended with a very ambiguous wedding proposal. Just after she has seen her son off to college, McChesney‘s business partner proposes while they are in her office at the firm: ―Emma,‖ said T.A. evenly, do you realize that you are virtually hounding me into asking you to marry me?‖ ―T.A.!‖ gasped Emma McChesney. ―Well, you did say you wanted someone to worry about, didn‘t you?‖ A little whimsical smile lay lightly on his lips. ―Timothy Buck, I‘m over forty years old.‖ ―Emma, in another minute I‘m going to grow sentimental, and nothing can stop me.

She looked down at her hands. There fell a little silence. Buck stirred, leaned forward. She looked up from the little watch that ticked away at her wrist.

―The minute‘s up, T.A.,‖ said Emma McChesney. (161)

So ends the story. This vague ending marks the final story in what would be collected as Personality Plus: Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock . This plot provides intrigue, holding the readers‘ attention until the next story while also engaging the audience socially and politically. It also gave Ferber a chance to figure out what to do about McChesney‘s marital status, something that would keep readers interested, would keep her employed, and also would accomplish her ideological and literary goals, hoping again to bring readers to a place where they recognized the value of alternative models of womenhood. This was also the last McChesney story published in American Magazine. When Ferber moved her venue for the McChesney stories to Cosmopolitan magazine in 1915, American Magazine replaced Ferber‘s serial stories with a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, A Novel of To-Day: The Fifth Wheel. A brief analysis of this replacement shows a shift in the magazine even more fully toward conservative, consumer-driven gender ideologies. The magazine was beginning to pick up on the emerging ―flapper,‖ a safer version of the emancipated woman—safer in part because she was merely having a good time before marriage. Occupying the cover of the October 1915 issue is an image of the new protagonist and, in large print, the advertisement: ―Beginning The Fifth Wheel: A Novel of a Young Woman‘s Social and Business Adventures.‖ The description of ―business‖ on the cover hearkens back to the McChesney stories, and the protagonist is depicted professionally. This would have drawn in readers looking fruitlessly for the McChesney story they were expecting. Inside the magazine, however, it becomes clear that this novel focuses less on a professional business woman and more on a young woman who, as the magazine‘s editors explain in their head note, ―at eighteen was mistress of the highly specialized game of man- hunting, as taught by American society‖ (October 1915, 4). Flagg‘s full page color illustration on the inside of the magazine shows the young woman with a vacant downward stare and indifferent rouge lips, a character combining the girlish features of the Gibson image with the sexualized features of the flapper—she hardly seems like the same woman.

Figure 1 Emma McChesney in Figure 2 Cover: girlish, innocent Figure 3 Inside illustration: American Magazine: busy protagonist looks directly at viewer. mature, indifferent professional. protagonist.

With this story Flagg moves his ―coquette‖ from the magazine cover into the magazine fiction and, after Ferber‘s departure, American Magazine leans more fully toward the ―romance, home, consumption‖ model of American womanhood. The next McChesney story Ferber published, which was the first story printed in Cosmopolitan, seemed to show that she had decided Emma McChesney was better off single, and the story leaves no doubt that she has denied her business partner‘s marriage proposal. However, in the very next story, McChesney accepts a proposal after a single dinner date with her husband-to-be. Ferber decided to wait until her stories were published in Cosmopolitan, a less conservative venue in many ways, to have McChesney marry. This reveals that Ferber was trying to keep her readership strong after the change of venues; it also shows that Ferber was hesitant to carry out this plotline in the conservative American Magazine. Launched in 1886 as a fully illustrated twenty cent magazine, Cosmopolitan targeted families. Bought by Hearst, the magazine pushed over a million in circulation by 1918, functioning now more as a literary

45 magazine than as a family magazine (Tebbel and Zuckerman 480-499). With a higher circulation than American Magazine, Cosmopolitan featured more pages of advertising and listed addresses and information about schools for girls and Colleges for Women alongside schools for boys and Trade Schools. At the turn of the century, Cosmopolitan went so far as to try to establish its own University. Other ambitions included purchasing Cuban independence from Spain for $100 million, establishing an international language, avoiding a national depression through a credit system, and proposing a World Congress. Despite these far-reaching goals, however, much of the magazine‘s content still embodied conservative cultural attitudes about gender identity and marriage, reflecting and shaping the attitudes of its audience, who could secure a year‘s subscription to the periodical for one dollar and fifty cents. The editorial introduction to Ferber‘s first story with Cosmopolitan emphasizes McChesney‘s business, even though the previous stories in American Magazine centered around her son and her potential husband: Do you know Miss Ferber‘s great contribution to modern literature—the character of Emma McChesney, indefatigable and insuppressible saleswoman for the Featherloom Petticoat Company, and now partner in that flourishing concern, for whose prosperity she is largely responsible? (January 1915, 133) Readers, however, knew that the cultural tensions evoked over the course of the series would not be abandoned in the new venue. Roosevelt—and the thousands of readers like him—were likely thrilled at McChesney‘s acceptance of a wedding proposal. Readers devastated by Ferber‘s move, however, were quickly shown that this was no typical marriage. A careful reading reveals that Ferber intentionally constructs the marriage between McChesney and her business partner not only as an equal partnership, but as a business partnership. Immediately following the wedding of McChesney to T.A. Buck, McChesney is still thinking business. In fact, she almost misses the train out of town for the honeymoon because she was trying to secure a deal with a skirt buyer. She explains to her new husband, who now feels abandoned by McChesney (significantly) both in business and love, ―Don‘t be angry. You see, dear boy, I‘ve only been your wife for a week. But I‘ve been Featherloom petticoats for over fifteen years. It‘s a habit‖ (50). Conflating business and domestic rhetoric, their employees begin to call her ―McBuck.‖ Still, when her husband asks, ―for three months after our marriage will you try being just Mrs. T.A. Buck?‖ she agrees, using the business rhetoric of a contract:

It‘s a bargain. For three months I shall do nothing more militant than to pick imaginary threads off your coat lapel and pout when you mention business. At the end of those three months we‘ll go into private session, compare notes, and determine whether the plan shall cease or become permanent. Shake hands on it.(54) This form of marital decision-making is one of many signs that this marriage model is different from most. The irony of contractually accepting to temporarily alter one‘s personality, identity, and interests is highlighted by the formal business rhetoric that ends the agreement. Marriage, an institution founded on exchange and property, does not escape McChesney‘s business rhetoric. For three months, this contract is all-or-nothing. McChesney is to abandon the discourse of work altogether with her business partner and husband. Ferber sets up this unrealistic expectation to mirror what she saw as the expectations of men in marriages—to come home to a private, comfortable home away from the outside world, for women to completely bury their interests and intellect after marriage. As a feminist indictment of cultural expectations of marriage, the contract signals the disintegration of the false ideal promoted by the magazine. McChesney herself is in control of the terms of the contract, reversing the exchange of women and property typically signified by the institution of marriage. At the end of McChesney‘s three months of enforced ―leisure‖—three months of boredom and intellectual ennui—she informs T.A. that she is no homebody and that women who don‘t work ―have to work so hard to try to keep happy‖ (64). Ensuring readers of an equal partnership and appreciative husband, T.A. is thrilled by the news because he‘s missed his ―business partner every minute for three months‖ (64).17 They both agree that McChesney will return to the workplace immediately. The nonexistent transition between McChesney‘s nonworking days and her total re-immersion in the Featherloom Petticoat Company indicates the complete reversal back to the ―old‖ Emma McChesney. Ferber challenges the traditional model of domestic womanhood by vividly illustrating the debilitating effects of such a life on women and on men. Ferber negotiates the hegemonic dictate of marriage not by rejecting it, but by transforming the meaning of marriage for her protagonist.

17 Despite the unusual nature of their marriage, her husband‘s acceptance of this model is important, because even in the more egalitarian world McChesney inhabits, the patriarchal system requires he consent to her choice to return to work. Henry, the husband of one of McChesney‘s employees, refused to allow his new wife to work, and his refusal was final.

Ferber also challenges the cultural imperative for women to make a home in a single space. Ferber‘s protagonist reveals the ways in which women can claim the benefits of ―home‖ by constructing a community of women. Throughout the series, readers are introduced to women McChesney has befriended on her travels throughout the Midwest, and to friendships she has maintained in the big cities as well. In a 1912 McChesney story titled ―Pink Tights and Gingham,‖ McChesney meets Miss Blanche LeHaye of the Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles on an overnight train. McChesney takes pity on the burlesque actress and sees ―something decent and clean and beautiful‖ in the woman, ―beneath the comedy of the bleached hair, the flaccid face, and the bizarre wrapper; behind the coarseness and vulgarity and ignorance‖ (Roast Beef 113). This is not a flattering image of McChesney‘s new acquaintance. However, despite the obvious class stereotypes in this passage, McChesney‘s words also reveal Ferber‘s belief in the constructed qualities of female identity. She sees beauty beneath and behind the ―wrapper‖ that Blanche presents to the outside world. Blanche, too, is a business woman. She is independent, single, and free to do as she pleases, much like McChesney. The sexualized nature of Blanche‘s work, however, complicates easy parallels between the two characters. Blanche recognizes the pity in McChesney‘s eyes, and is angered. However, eager to find community on the road wherever she can find it, McChesney invites Blanche to spend a Sunday with her at her friend Ethel‘s house, explaining, Whenever I‘m anywhere near this town I make a jump and Sunday here. I‘ve a friend here named Morrissey—Ethel Morrissey—and she‘s the biggest-hearted, most understanding friend that a woman ever had. She‘s skirt and suit buyer at Barker & Fisk‘s here…I help her get dinner if I feel like it, and wash my hair if I want to, and sit out in the back yard, and fool with the dog, and act like a human being for one day. (123) Here, Ferber outlines the benefits and necessity of community for women. Community is defined as engaging with other women who share similar passions and can support each other in a comfortable, all-female environment. Ethel lives with her mother and is unmarried. This provides her the capacity to make independent moral decisions, such as providing a standing invitation to her friend Emma. Here, the dictates of True Womanhood do not prevail. The women are independent decision makers who work for pay and have found community outside the home. Once at Ethel‘s home, the women have the agency to decide their course of action. Emma can get dinner, but only if she ―feels like it‖; she can wash her hair if she ―wants to.‖ This

48 trip also offers non-domestic leisure—she can ―sit out in the back yard, and fool with the dog.‖ Before putting on her apron, Blanche comments, ―I‘ve been in a pair of pink tights so long that I guess I‘ve almost forgotten how to be a woman. But once I get this on I‘ll bet I can come back‖ (126). Here, Ferber reverses the association of female identity with feminine clothing (pink tights). Rather than unproblematically reproducing ideas about the natural state of gender roles, this scene serves to show a way to enjoy the domestic life without being restricted by male figures or without being entirely restricted to the private sphere. Ferber introduces domestic imagery but grants women agency within domestic and non-domestic environments, revealing opportunities for independence and community. As this scene continues, McChesney and her friend Ethel spend the day in a program of subtle uplift, sure that Blanche‘s hours of cooking, cleaning, baking, and wearing an apron will convince her to give up her burlesque acting career and settle into an office job, which both women offer her. The two women equate working in a kitchen to working in an office. Blanche‘s rebuff of these offers situates the burlesque women as practical, self-assured, hardworking, and conscious of their place within the paid workforce. She rejects their offer, proving their efforts at reforms are once futile and unnecessary, revealing a misplaced feeling of superiority—moral and intellectual—on the part of the reformers. In the end, however, the connection and community between the women is emphasized. All three of the women in this scene are middle-aged, single, and working. Ignoring or rejecting the male attention that seems naturally to come with the territory of the public sphere is an important facet of their gender identities. McChesney‘s friend Edith is a buyer for a local department store; her profession resembles McChesney‘s with the exception that hers is not a traveling position. She is able to have a home life. Still, no husband, children, or marriages are spoken of in the scene. This presents a model of a potential identity for McChesney should she leave the traveling business—settling down alone in a domestic yet all- female space. That this option is legitimized within a scene that equally legitimizes the choice of burlesque entertainer reflects the destabilization process taking place in Ferber‘s specific project of acknowledging a wide range of female behaviors and life decisions. In the Emma McChesney stories, a burlesque actress has the same potential to become an independent, resistant woman as anyone else. The McChesney series was the first of many critiques Ferber made of the conservative ideologies of domesticity circulated in the magazine print culture. Her Pulitzer Prize winning

1924 novel, So Big, was serialized in Women’s Home Companion. In the opening pages of the novel, young Selina peruses Godey‘s Ladies’ Book, comparing her clothing to the costumes in its pages, when her gambling father is dragged, dead, into the house. Ferber uses this event to drive the young woman to find work. In her later unhappy marriage, Selina uses the domestic ideology of the magazines to criticize her own surroundings. Ferber takes issue with women who rely on magazines for their definitions of ideal domesticity. Later works highlight Ferber‘s explicit commitment to exposing the blind spots of domestic ideologies, emphasizing work and equality for women. The serialized Emma McChesney series foregrounds the inadequacy of mass-media representations of women while maintaining a careful equilibrium between feminist aspirations and Ferber‘s need to support herself as a working writer. Balancing popular, feminist, domestic, and New Woman discourses, Ferber attempted to influence the literary marketplace by introducing a feminist character who could appeal to—or at the very least engage—a variety of audiences. Editorial policies and reader reception regulated literary production, and while Ferber did not always respond to these public demands, her literary authority was undoubtedly limited. The 1910s was a decade fraught with cultural tensions about gender roles, the public sphere, marriage, divorce, and work. The last words of the series, although not of this cultural debate, are McChesney‘s: ―there‘s nothing equal to the soul-filling satisfaction that you get in solo work‖ (Emma McChesney 107). The promise Ferber does make here is that if released from domestic and patriarchal representations, and given autonomy and opportunity, her female contemporaries could rise above the role of domestic servant. By breaking their susceptibility to print culture and advertising, women could claim agency and determine the fate of their own lives. Resisting the hegemonic constructions of womanhood that dictated marriage, home life, and children in specific and restrictive ways, Ferber uses business rhetoric throughout her narratives to open a space for herself as an independent, single, paid writer in American society. As we study characters in magazine fiction, we must consider the ways authors articulate and critique the cultural ideas circulated by mass media, while also making studied compromises to secure their own independence with a monthly paycheck from that same media.

Chapter Two Representations of Women in Dorothy Parker‘s Early Magazine Work

In 1920, as prohibition settled in and the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Dorothy Parker‘s quick wit got her fired from Vanity Fair. Soon after, her WWI -veteran husband (whom she had married hastily before the war) returned from Germany addicted to barbiturates. Amidst this turmoil, she contracted to write a series of sketches for Ladies’ Home Journal, a far cry from her previous job at the ―highbrow‖ Vanity Fair, but an opportunity for Parker to reach more than one million American women. In one sketch, for example, Parker hones in on the hostess of a dinner party: A moment‘s delay in the service brings her to the verge of a mental breakdown; she bursts into rapid, irrelevant discourse, while her eyes are fixed in a desperate glare and her fingers play soundless tarantellas on the tablecloth. (―A Dinner Party Anthology 1920) In these sketches, Parker uses the ideological register of the venue as a starting point for her narratives. Ladies’ Home Journal was chock full of advice for the efficient, womanly management of servants and guests. Parker‘s narrative challenges this stereotypical role through ironic overstatement. The hostess‘s ―desperate glare‖ highlights the negative, unlikeable persona created by this representation. Forcing ―irrelevant discourse,‖ this role also compels the hostess to isolate herself from the very community of women she has invited into her home. Here, and in the rest of her early magazine work, Parker challenges female language, representations, and stereotypes. Many of the representations Parker challenges—the good souls, the domestic ones, the mothers, the socialites, the slackers, the partiers—appear frequently in the advertising and content of her venues. Parker exploits the hybrid, contradictory space of magazines to critique the pretension and self-deception required by True and New Woman ideologies and by domestic ideologies reified during the Great War. Her readers, she knew, usually came to her work steeped in the very value systems whose blind spots she sought to expose. This study focuses on Parker‘s earliest magazine publications, specifically her work for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Between 1915 and 1920, Dorothy Parker published sixty-two pieces in Vanity Fair (13 poems, 11 essays pseudonymsly as Helen Wells,

14 prose essays, and 26 monthly theater reviews), seven signed essays in Vogue (also dozens of long captions, many unsigned), and four sketches in Ladies’ Home Journal. Ranging from articles on beauty treatments to poems about WWI, from theater reviews to popular sketches indicting the values and concerns of upper middle class Americans, the first decade of Parker‘s career was shaped by her employment as a staff writer for these magazines. From the beginning, Parker was interested in resisting the hegemonic models of womanhood saturating popular culture. Parker has never been out of print, thanks largely to Penguin‘s The Portable Dorothy Parker, which Parker herself first arranged in 1944. Until recently, Parker was nonetheless remembered only vaguely as a member of the Algonquin Round Table and as a symbol of 1920s frivolity. The 1950s New Critical movement solidified Parker‘s reputation as a second-rate author writing about women in conventional forms and she suffered when the ―modernist‖ canon was expurgated of writers deemed not adequately experimental. In the seventies, however, second-wave feminists like Suzanne Bunkers revived interest in Parker the feminist, the poet, and the satirist.18 A decade later, new analyses of Parker‘s work began to unpack the linguistic complexity of Parker‘s fiction. Paula Treichler‘s influential 1980 article, for example, uses ―The Waltz‖ to show how Parker develops a ―language of female survival‖ (181). Both Bunkers and Treichler briefly mention Sunset Gun, Parker‘s 1928 record-breaking, bestselling first book of poetry, but these scholars are more interested in a feminist analysis of Parker‘s fiction, ignoring her earlier, more disparate work. One prominent Parker scholar, Arthur Kinney, sees her early work as a mere apprenticeship. The only value of her early work, he claims, is understanding how her association with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood at Vanity Fair helped her develop the narrative persona of ―the put-upon little woman‖ (10). This conclusion is condescending and fails to take into account the accomplished aesthetic and thematic Parker had developed before her ―association‖ with Benchley and Sherwood. Kinney also claims that Parker was too apt to ―carry brief ideas a great distance.‖ However, it is this intense focus that allowed Parker to target

18 Suzanne L. Bunkers ―‗I am outraged womanhood: Dorothy Parker as Feminist and Social Critic (1978), with Coda,‖ in The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker, ed. Rhonda S. Petit (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2005). Evoking and revising earlier negative comparisons to Parker‘s contemporaries, Bunkers shows the ways Parker‘s work denies the hegemonic cultural story (which claims women freely choose one- dimensional roles) presented by authors such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. By examining Parker‘s poetry and ―Big Blonde,‖ Bunkers also revealed the ways Parker‘s negative female stereotypes criticize the society that forces women into one-dimensional roles as much as criticizing women themselves.

52 seemingly narrow social situations and connect them to ideology and personal experience to create the layered, dialogic meanings of her best work. Parker‘s biographer, Marion Meade refers to Parker‘s work in 1920 and 1921 as ―bushels of fluff‖—―much of it humorous light verse that appealed to the same audience who gobbled up Scott Fitzgerald‘s frothy flapper stories. Fluff was short, silly, easy to write, and it paid the bills‖ (88). While some of Parker‘s work can, of course, be considered ―light,‖ much of her work during this period reveals a complex focus on social and discursive categories of women, and so on language, social construction, female stereotypes and self-deception. During her tenure as a magazine writer, developed the strategy of using representations of women to critique and record changes to the ways women were seen and how they saw themselves. She investigates how people function within restrictive social categories and how they react to potential changes in the ways those categories operate in the larger urban American culture. Despite a privileged childhood, Parker came to the magazine business as an unmarried young woman in need. In 1913, Parker‘s father, a Jewish cloak salesman of Prussian origins, died after his brother‘s death on the Titanic sent him into a deep depression. Parker‘s mother died when Parker was only five years old, and her stepmother died before she was ten. Parker was largely self-taught, which restricted her occupational choices. ―I didn‘t finish high school,‖ Parker later recalled, ―but by God, I read‖ (Meade 28). After her father died, Parker sought work in New York City. She worked at a dance studio, playing piano while she tried to memorize song hits and write light verse (Meade). One of her first poems, a fragmented series of overheard pieces of conversation, ―Any Porch,‖ was accepted by Vanity Fair in 1914. This success prompted Parker to approach the editor-in-chief to ask for a job; a few months later, Crowninshield offered her a position at Vanity Fair‘s sister fashion publication, Vogue. While Parker didn‘t exactly flourish under Edna Chase‘s strict management, the position allowed her to continue working on her verses in her free time and she got paid for testing diets, beauty preparations, and exercise regimens for the magazine. To understand Parker‘s critique of the gender roles legitimated in popular magazines, let us turn briefly to the magazines themselves. No matter the political stance of the magazine, the Woman Question saturated its editorials, advertisements, stories, and articles. If prevailing attitudes and beliefs about women stressed home and family duties, feminists stressed women‘s rights. Conservative magazines acknowledged the women‘s club movement and the suffrage

53 movement, even if they criticized their goals. Content often focused on women‘s work, settlement houses, and cooperative housekeeping movements, even if magazines did not believe that women‘s economic independence was (or should be) on the horizon. Collier’s, for example, ran an advertisement in Vogue for its November 18, 1916 issue with the heading ―Should a wife be paid a salary?‖ The full page announcement advertises a charming story about a young social leader who suddenly learns that she can earn money by teaching other people‘s children. Her husband‘s horror when she suggests that he should pay her a salary for taking care of her own children is easy to understand—or perhaps it isn‘t. Decide for yourself.

Collier’s advertising department obviously did not view Vogue‘s readers as uninterested in woman‘s place in society, nor did they believe their readers to have made up their minds on the issue, or they would have framed the advertisement differently. The very prevalence of the woman question in all manner of mass media during the 1910s left few angles unexamined and few Americans (men or women) unaware of the discussions. The Collier’s ad encompasses many of the major themes of this discourse—female ―social leader[s],‖ motherhood, work for pay, and differing opinions between men and women. The journalistic phrase ―New Woman‖ reached its peak a few years before Parker‘s tenure at Vogue, but the ideas encompassed by that reference remained significant.19 New Women‘s desire for independence was most strong in ―work, social activities, self development, self presentation, affection, [and] relationship[s],‖ and these values had by 1915 carried over to many women who would never identify themselves as feminist ―New Women,‖ Parker included (268). Younger, nonpolitical women also appeared in this discourse. Likely influenced by WWI, many found the clamor for women‘s rights annoying. They took the gains earned by older generations and used them to flirt in public, to work at an office before getting married, and to vote in their husbands‘ favorite politicians. For slightly older audiences, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal worked to translate feminism into scientific homemaking, adapted from an increasingly popular Taylorism in business. This

19 Richard Ohmann identifies many of the most salient activities supposed ―New Women‖ engaged in, including ―belonging to clubs, doing social work, living apart from parents or husband, moving about in public alone, working for a living or on principle, seeking wide and worldy knowledge through formal education or otherwise, thinking for oneself, speaking assertively about public issues in mixed company, giving speeches, taking part in sports (cycling, swimming, golfing), smoking, wearing or agitating for rational dress, seeking equal marriage, disavowing marriage altogether, caring little for love, denying the obligation of motherhood.‖

―advance‖ claimed that speed and efficiency were crucial in raising children, cooking, and cleaning—that any failure here was seen as a failure of femininity. Parker‘s magazine writing used humor to indict the false behaviors necessitated by the conservative images of women (domestic, romantic) spread by magazines. Parker‘s humor negotiated between insulting her often conservative audience (and editors) and speaking to them about the negative effects of narrow definitions of womanhood. Parker contributed to a growing discourse on the Woman Question, which encompassed consumer culture, sexuality, gender, class, and modernity. Her work presented a unique and at times radical voice and a message about social constructivism to a mass audience unsure how to read messages encouraging changes to prevailing gender ideologies. Parker‘s early themes were a reflection of women‘s often nontraditional experiences of modernity—alienation, sexual dissatisfaction, ennui, and often the impossible pressures toward consumption and domesticity.

“Widow, Maid or Wife”: Parker’s Beginnings at Vogue

An elite fashion and high society publication, Vogue may seem like an inauspicious place for the introduction of an artist like Parker, who used humor to challenge the ideologies shaping upper-class women‘s identities. Parker‘s humor and irony, however, created a space for her critique. Vogue, after all, was interested in appealing to moneyed readers, not in contesting ideological or social boundaries. The most ―progressive‖ content that Vogue was to publish during the critical years of debate about women‘s role in society was the advice that ―If women took more thought for their negligees, there wouldn‘t be half so many divorces.‖20 To fully understand the context of Parker‘s works, I want to turn to the framework provided by the magazine. When Vogue was purchased by Conde Nast in 1909, its weekly circulation was a midrange 22,500 and this circulation never dramatically increased (Peterson 26). At 25 cents per copy, Vogue was more than twice as expensive as other magazines of the day. Vogue‘s purpose was to sell a small, wealthy, socially elite audience to advertisers looking

20 ―Here Comes the Bride‘s Number‖, editorial, April 15, 1917; another example of their political position came in this editorial comment: ―the latest happenings in lingerie…are almost nothing to speak of, and we fully realize that they never, never wore things like that when Mother was a girl.‖ (―Vogue in the Role of Santa Claus,‖ 15 Nov 1916 editorial). Of history, Vogue was interested only in how ―Scarfs Have Played Their Important Part since the Beginnings of Things‖ The magazine was unable to completely ignore the world war during America‘s involvement, so it chose to present activities that supported the war as the fashionable thing to do and encouraged American fashion designers to step up to replace French designers.

55 to sell high-end items like cars, jewelry, and furs. The magazine‘s editor was a woman, Edna Woolman Chase, from 1914 to 1952. Always demanding a well-disciplined work environment, Chase ensured that the tone of the magazine remained elite, the writers and illustrators top notch, and the fashions cutting-edge. To further distinguish itself from competitors, which relied on fiction to increase circulation, Vogue did not publish short fiction at all. Instead, Vogue appealed to wealthy elite women by isolating their interests in an entertaining and sometimes practical way. Vogue‘s ―Shoppers‘ and Buyers‘ Guide‖ reflected this appeal in separate sections for antiques, art galleries, ―beauty cultures,‖ flesh reductions, and social stationary. Readers could page through advertisements in search of ideas for Christmas gifts or read up on subjects like ―Paris and the New Gaiety.‖ The tone of Vogue was frivolous, light-hearted, and sophisticated. Parker‘s six essays for Vogue during 1916 and 1917 subtly lampooned the social interests most upheld by the magazine, such as interior design, weddings, hair care, fashion and dogs. The humor in these pieces is a critique of the representation of women as silly, frivolous, and cheerful, interested only in the latest hairstyle or scarf. This consumer-driven model of womanhood, Parker‘s work suggests, deceives women into believing that ―buying‖ can substitute for female community and independent selfhood. One of her first pieces to appear in the magazine, ―The Lady in Back‖ (1916), published under Parker‘s maiden name (Rothschild), addresses this very issue (November 15, 1916, Vogue). It is about ―that‖ person—the one who talks through plays, sings along at operas, and gives away the ending at movies The poem is tucked between advertisements for cold cream, wedding rings, and crystal cocktail glasses and shares the page with a bit on Parisian society. Parker‘s humorous wit and irony are evident throughout the poem, which begins: I don‘t know what her name is, for you see, we‘ve never met;

I don‘t know if she‘s dark, or if she‘s fair;

I don‘t know if she‘s young or old, or rich or poor,--and yet

Whatever place I chance to go, she‘s there.

I don‘t know where she came from, and I don‘t know where she‘ll go;

Why Fate has linked our lives I cannot see.

The world‘s so full of people,--oh, I‘d really like to know

Why must she always sit in back of me?

As an introduction to Parker‘s magazine writing, ―The Lady in Back‖ reflects many of Parker‘s techniques of irony, repetition, and the use of character types. These techniques allow Parker to appeal to a specific audience—fashionable ladies who attend operas and plays—while still challenging conservative value systems (such as vestiges of True Womanhood) that control interpersonal female behavior. One of the most important themes of the poem, the mystery of the woman‘s identity, is overshadowed on a first reading by its humor and by the traditional, lulling iambic meter and ABAB rhyme scheme. The poem‘s speaker, however, focuses on the unknown status of the woman‘s name, ethnicity, age, and class in the opening stanza. The speaker repeats the phrase ―I don‘t know‖ three times in this first stanza, emphasizing her inability to ―place‖ the woman. Name, ethnicity, and class would have marked the woman in a clear system of social interaction. In a decade marked by conspicuous consumption and massive immigration, a stranger‘s ethnicity, name, and class—the very markers missing in this setup—were read as signs of a woman‘s worth and value system. Although the speaker of the poem asserts that there is in fact one woman who shadows her at various entertainments, readers quickly recognize that the ―lady‖ is a mirror of some representations of women available in the pages of Vogue. The middle three stanzas are organized around a play, an opera, and a picture show. The ―lady‖ has already seen the play— ―And so she tells me what‘s coming in her entertaining way.‖ At the opera, she sings along ―just a trifle off the key.‖ The ―lady‖ seems to have a lot of leisure time to attend multiple plays and memorize opera songs, much like the upper class readers of Vogue magazine. Lest readers of the poem believe this type of character only frequents elite entertainment, Parker extends the list to the ―humble picture show,‖ indicating that no economic or social class is free from the effects of gender ideologies that isolate women from female community and independent selfhood. In this poem, the urban anonymity is intensified by the entertainment venues women that encompass women‘s access to the public sphere. The final stanza expounds on the woman‘s anonymity: I really couldn‘t tell you if she‘s widow, maid or wife;

I‘ve never heard about her family;

I don‘t know who appointed her to take the joy from life;

I can‘t imagine what she sees in me.

Marital status was meant to be visually evident for women at this time—a woman‘s adherence to social and cultural regulations ranging from appropriate clothing, access to the public sphere, accompaniment by a chaperone, and the wearing of a wedding ring all contributed to a stranger‘s knowledge of a woman‘s marital status. Here, her status as a ―widow, maid, or wife‖ is hidden by the darkness of the venue. Using semi-colons, rather than her more common dashes and commas, Parker emphasizes the intense interrelatedness of each category to every woman‘s identity. ―The Lady in Back‖ represents an early rumination on the futility of stereotypes as a method of understanding women in a large American city. Because the speaker never turns around to interact with the woman, she cannot really make judgments based on her visual appearance. Ultimately, the anonymity provided by the layout and darkness of theaters, operas and movie houses makes these identity markers irrelevant. All that matters finally is the woman‘s gender and personal behavior—there is no doubt that this is a ―Lady,‖ rather than a man, in back. Readers can only assume that the woman‘s voice gives her away to the speaker. The mysterious and unknown details of the woman‘s appearance, background, and family make her the ―Everywoman.‖ This ―Everywoman‖ is rude, annoying, and worrisome. Using humor allowed Parker to imply the possibility of anonymity, suggesting that women need not to be defined based on name, family, ethnicity, age, class, and marital status. Parker also highlights the social regulation that makes seeking female companionship a potentially dangerous and undesirable behavior from women. It was socially acceptable for women to congregate in public at operas, theater, and the movies, all places designed to disconnect the viewer from the outside world and isolate her mind from the people around her. Anyone who disrupts this entertainment environment is a mystery, an annoyance, and a disgrace to the only category to which she is assigned by the speaker—her sex. ―The Lady in Back‖ is a somewhat immature, early poem in Parker‘s oeuvre, yet it accomplishes a range of aesthetic and thematic successes. The poem introduces readers to a writer interested in using repetition and situational irony to explore gender ideologies, contemplate social etiquette, and to question the effects of social construction. In this case, Parker uses anonymity to challenge the social exclusivity of Vogue while also exposing the effects of representations of women. As her career progressed, Parker came to see social construction as having a greater effect on women.

Six months after ―A Lady in Back‖ was published in the back of the magazine, Parker‘s prose contribution ―Life on a Permanent Wave‖ received a more coveted placement toward the beginning of the magazine, mixed among popular fashion articles. ―Life on a Permanent Wave‖ is a full page, first-person account of Parker‘s (then Rothschild) experiences at a salon receiving a popular 1917 hair treatment, the permanent wave. This piece is an early example of Parker‘s development of character types as a method of criticizing ideologies that force women to exaggerate constructed qualities of femininity. She employs irony, understatement, and humor to challenge the very social ideals that Vogue relied on for profit. The one and a half page sketch is divided into three titled sections—A Glimpse of the Future, In the Throes, and Another Atrocity—and runs onto a later page in the magazine. It begins, ―I gazed earnestly into the mirror and decided that I simply couldn‘t stand it any longer.‖ Her hair is too straight, she explains, and that is decidedly unfashionable. Before describing the torturous process of the treatment for readers in a supposedly firsthand account, the narrator admits, ―If I had thought that there could be any possible disagreeableness connected with the process,—well, I never would have gone in for it, that‘s all.‖ Parker creates a ―sensitive‖ and naïve narrator, a ―type‖ she criticizes in other work.21 Here, it is a strategic device designed to use the narrator (to readers of Vogue, Parker herself) as a representative of the object of criticism in the piece. At the salon, the narrator is put into a white garment that makes her look ―startlingly like a charter member of the Klu Klux Klan.‖ The attendant ―seized me and shampooed me so efficiently that every thought was washed out of my mind.‖ The chair for the procedure, the narrator explains, was a ―sort of modified Iron Maiden.‖ Parker presents the procedure as a method of erasure, eliminating female thought through torture. Part way through, ―Monsieur hairdresser‖ and his attendant leave the room with the parting instruction: ―When it starts to hurt, all you have to do is shout for me.‖ ―Unaccustomed as I am to public shrieking,‖ I began, but the heartless wretch had vanished. There I sat, plunged in gloom.

21 The narrator expounds in the opening paragraph, for example, ―If I have a headache, I always suffer more than any other people with headaches do; if I have a cold, I always know it is going to develop into far graver things than other people‘s do.‖ Some of Parker‘s Ladies’ Home Journal pieces clearly show unmistakable disdain for this overly-sensitive type. In a later piece, for example, Parker writes of one hypochondriac whose ―coy afflictions‖ include rheumatism and headaches, ―If she were ever brought face to face with a germ she would promptly lose consciousness from sheer terror. So, one rather imagines, would the germ.‖

The narrator continues in this way, narrating the process of getting the permanent wave, reflecting on her place in the ―torture chamber‖ of ―German atrocities,‖ wondering what color wig she should choose when all her hair falls out, as she was certain it would. At the end, however, she exclaims: I know what Heaven will be like; I experienced it in that moment. I was incoherent with joy, the girl was vociferous with elation, and I think Monsieur shed tears. When things grew calmer, I left the place—oh, the wonder of seeing my hair curl under my hat brim— and motored home, a new woman. Obviously, there is a shift from the narrator‘s opening statement that she would not in fact have gotten the procedure if she knew the pain involved and this final jubilation over the results. Parker has extended hyperbole throughout the piece. The narrator oversells the narrative descriptions of the procedure and the ―amazing‖ results that brought joy and a ―new life‖ to the narrator. The pattern of optimism/fear/optimism repeats several times throughout the piece. After the amped-up descriptions of the fear and pain-inducing procedure, the optimism at the end seems disingenuous. However, Parker‘s use of a fictionalized narrator for a supposedly firsthand account, and her continued strategies of humor, repetition, and hyperbole, present readers with a believable tale whose moral is, ostensibly, that fashionable beauty is worth any price. This message would have flowed seamlessly within a venue whose purpose is to support a culture based on wealth, consumer products, appearances, and fashion. Both the narrator and the readers know that the procedure ends successfully, but the girl who is undergoing the treatment does not. Further consideration of the piece, however, reveals the text finally functions as a critique of the lengths women will travel to achieve a socially-constructed image of beauty. The narrator is set up throughout to be overly-sensitive and unreliable, so her claims of elation over her wavy hair read as hyperbole. Parker herself was very conscious of her physical appearance; she was severely nearsighted but refused to wear glasses in public. Her narrative here reveals that she was critical of the pressures to be feminine and fashionable and that she nonetheless feared the results of not obeying those pressures. Through a combination of fiction and nonfiction, and of repetition and hyperbole, Parker‘s essay, which appears to praise the permanent wave, actually suggests that social expectations of women‘s beauty (reinforced heavily in fashion magazines like Vogue) are potentially dangerous and wash all thought from the mind. The humor of the piece plays down

60 its seriousness and makes it palatable to readers. Parker offers no solutions about how to end women‘s participation in these ―torture chambers,‖ but she does masterfully draw attention to the ways that these images of beauty are constructed. Experimenting with her style and with how far she could push a venue‘s expectations of writers, Parker‘s work for an upper-class female audience at Vogue expresses frustration with society‘s expectations for women, and with women‘s reactions to those expectations. Humor, hyperbole, understatement, irony, repetition, dialogic structure, and a focus on language drive the aesthetic behind these messages, a challenging aesthetic that found a surprising home in the pages of an elite women‘s fashion magazine.

Vanity Fair At Vanity Fair, Parker continued to use humor, repetition, and irony to expose the ways social expectations and restrictions turn women into dupes of an invisible system. Parker‘s work consistently examined the same grouping of female stereotypes that she first recognizes as a staff writer for Vanity Fair. While she was still on staff at Vogue, Parker published a brief poem in Vanity Fair that shows the aesthetic and thematic of Parker‘s work for Vanity Fair approaching the 1920s. ―A Musical Comedy Thought,‖ in full, reads:

My heart is fairly melting at the thought of Julian Eltinge;

His vice versa, Vesta Tilley, too.

Our language is so dexterous, let us call them ambi-sextrous—

Why hasn‘t this occurred before to you?

Julian Eltinge was an actor best known in the 1910s for his work in drag. Vesta Tilley, a ―male impersonator‖ made her name in England but was also popular in the United States. In this short poem, Parker makes the compelling argument that language need not impede a clear understanding of identity. Parker‘s last line indicts the audience/reader for their lack of reflection about gender performances. The punch line is not the term ―ambi-sextrous‖; instead, it is the indictment of the audience‘s unthinking dismissal of both gender ambiguity and language. Parker links a lack of creativity on the part of the reader to an ignorant refusal to think . This refusal isolates trans or cross-gendered persons. The poem suggests that ignoring limits to agency can

61 lead to a refusal to explore the ways social, historical, and political constructs wield power in violent or harmful ways. Language limits available discourse and structures thought and experience, but this only partially limits and shapes subjectivity. Parker stretches the ideological boundaries of female behavior in the poem by admitting that her ―heart is fairly melting‖ for both actors, indicating an attraction to a male, a female, and two drag personas. Parker did not, however, need to cross traditional poetic boundaries in order to represent the social construction of sexual difference. The four line poem is tightly and formally written as an alternating heptameter/pentameter stanza. By addressing the reader in the last line—―why hasn‘t this occurred before to you?‖—she creates a dialogic structure. This suggests a responsibility for continuing conversations about performance and gender expectations. Here, Parker continues her investigation of gender boundaries and expectations, failures and flaws forced by ideological indoctrination, and the alienation caused by an urban society‘s rules and regulations. The focus on language that Parker expresses in this poem is continued with increasingly greater deliberation and force in her work through 1920 until it became a primary thematic in her fiction of the mid 1920s. This poem found itself at home in the pages of Vanity Fair not because Vanity Fair was cutting edge on issues of sexuality and linguistic dexterity, but because Vanity Fair focused on actors, theater, and modernism. Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield wanted to replicate the aesthetic and spirit of little magazines while keeping his upper class readership socially and culturally up-to-date and thoroughly entertained (Murphy). The magazine printed Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, Eliot, e.e. cummings, Stein, and D.H. Lawrence alongside articles on modernism, primitivism, cubism, dancing, vorticism, travel, dog shows, social scandals, and real estate. Parker‘s aesthetic exploited Crowinshield‘s editorial policies, shaping her work through irony, understatement, and repetition that fit in well with an aesthetic of modernity desired by the magazine. She focused her challenge of narrow-minded models of womanhood to mesh with the magazine‘s society pages. Parker‘s project of exposing and challenging restrictive categories of women also fit in well with the highly visual nature of the magazine‘s fifty full pages of advertising in each issue. In one self-advertising sketch, ―A House Party at Newport: And the Truth about the Scandalous Goings- on in the Conservatory at ‗Nevercoff‘,‖ characters attending a high class society party are actually popular advertising icons—the Redform Corset Girl, the Cough Drop Twins, the Onyx Hose Girl (September 1916). The story ends with the fictional speaker, who believed he had

62 stumbled into a society party, very slowly coming to the realization that ―This isn‘t Newport— this is only an advertising page in Vanity Fair!‖ Society, fiction, reality, and advertising became a ―powerfully seamless single tissue‖ in the pages of the magazine, the advertising icons serving as the visual representations of female identity that Parker challenges in her work (70). This seamlessness between art and consumer culture affected the way that Parker‘s texts functioned on the pages of the magazine. An insider to the magazine business, Parker knew how easily one‘s artistic productions could be used to communicate the ideology and values of the magazine. Vanity Fair may have been progressive in publishing avant-garde art, but its social values were conservative. Short ―playlets‖ printed sporadically in the magazine often showcased these values by mocking changes in gendered social structures. A July 1916 problem play, for example, grieves women‘s loss of motherly instinct. In the playlet, two children decide to adopt new parents because ―well, you see my mother has nothing but her clubs, and ideas, and settlement work.‖ This highlights Vanity Fair‘s primary vehicle for communicating its surprisingly conservative values—light-hearted entertainment. At the brink of U.S. involvement in World War I, Vanity Fair vowed to remain light-hearted:

We are not going to print any pretty girls‘ heads on its covers. We are going to spare you the agony of sex discussions. We shall publish no dreary serial stories. No diaries of travel. No hack articles on preparedness. No gloom. No problem stories. No articles on tariff, or irrigation, or railroad rates, or pure food, or any other statistical subjects. We Promise You, Solemnly. (January 1916, 31)

Vanity Fair, then, provided a seamless outlet for Parker‘s use of humor as a challenge to the ideologies restricting female identity, even as the mood in the country became darker approaching U.S. involvement in World War I. In ―Women: A Hate Song,‖ the 1916 poem that convinced Vanity Fair‘s editors to hire Parker as a full-time staff writer, Parker challenges a whole range of available representations of female identity.22 Afraid the poem would offend readers but still excited enough to publish it, Crowninshield suggested she use a pseudonym, an action he did not suggest for her gender

22 Parker goes on to ―hate‖ a variety of people in her career, but it is worthwhile to note that she first chooses to ―hate‖ women before her association with the men of the Algonquin Round Table (Robert Benchley, Sherwood Anderson), and before the failure of her first marriage. Parker‘s focus on fallible women has been attributed to these two foundational life events.

63 exploration in ―A Musical Comedy Thought.‖ Only twenty-four years old when she joined the staff at Vanity Fair, Parker would eventually write nearly twenty ―Hate Songs‖ on a variety of types, including men, actresses, relatives, slackers, wives, husbands, college boys, and bohemians. ―Women: A Hate Song‖ was especially popular, and it was this poem that encouraged Parker to continue the series under her own name. In this poem, Parker is direct, employing less of the subtlety and understatement of earlier work. The poem begins, ―I hate Women; They get on my nerves‖ (italics original). What follows are six free-verse stanzas, each of which treats one identity available to women in the pages of popular magazines. The first stanza reads: There are the Domestic ones.

They are the worst.

Every moment is packed with Happiness.

They breathe deeply

And walk with large strides, eternally hurrying home

To see about dinner.

They are the kind

Who say, with a tender smile, ―Money‘s not everything.‖

They are always confronting me with dresses,

Saying, ―I made this myself.‖

They read Woman‘s pages and try out the recipes.

Oh, how I hate that kind of woman.

In this first stanza, Parker focuses on the ideology of domesticity legitimated and disseminated by the ―Woman‘s pages.‖ Parker indicts all ―domestic ones‖ in this poem—there are no individualizing characteristics here. A woman who proudly makes her own dresses and happily tries out recipes from the Woman‘s page, Parker argues, must recognize that her values are being manipulated by a market desiring to sell magazines. The ideological system tells women that their roles as wives and mothers are vitally important and that these roles should fulfill them.

Living by these ideologies requires intense self-deception to achieve false happiness, Parker‘s work argues. This stanza, like each of the free verse stanzas in the poem, unfolds the support for the speaker‘s challenge to this role. The final line of each stanza typically delivers a personal reflection on the type—from ―Oh, how they bore me‖ to ―Don‘t you hate them?‖ These lines reinforce and finalize the message of the stanza and establish a humorous, insider tone. Each stanza indicts a specific kind of gender expectation. The ideology of True Womanhood had been altered by the fight for women‘s rights and by consumerism and urbanization. The ideology now required women to be domestic, sensitive, deeply feeling, desirable, up-to-date on culture, and cheerful. The second stanza of ―Women: A Hate Song‖ attacks ―the human Sensitive Plants‖ or ―The Bundles of Nerves,‖ women who frequently tear up and are easily hurt. Then there are those who ―wear faint, wistful smiles,‖ the ―Well-Informed ones,‖ those ―who simply cannot Fathom/ Why all the men are mad about them‖ and, finally, the ―Cheerful ones‖—a type that Parker challenged throughout her life and work. She walks through each stereotype—or available female role—and indicts the way it forces women to take the role in serious and self- involved ways. Frequently, it is the women‘s language choices that reveal the depths to which they are affected by these available representations. The language of women who ―simply cannot Fathom/ Why all the men are mad about them‖ is one example.

They tell you about someone‘s husband;

What he said

And how he looked when he said it.

And then they sigh and ask,

―My dear, what is there about me?‖

—Don‘t you hate them?

Here, Parker uses the dialogic structure of the final question to bring her readers into agreement with her, setting her up for the final lines of the next stanza: ―I sometimes yearn to kill them./ Any jury would acquit me.‖ The women in Parker‘s poem have been exposed before a jury of their peers, and the verdict is not good. Parker uses generic, stereotypical character types in order

65 to challenge the roles forced upon women by the available representations of identity within the magazines. She uses repetition, humor, and irony to indict the ideological frameworks shaping female identity and the language used to express those frameworks in magazine culture. What is interesting about the context of Parker‘s challenge is that it shares a page in the magazine with a nonfiction story about a Haymarket anarchist, recluse, and writer who believed a mysterious woman watched over and protected him (―Love and the Thunderstorm‖ 61). The lonely recluse has imagined an ―ideal‖ woman, a woman who possesses the very qualities challenged in Parker‘s poem. This story‘s juxtaposition with ―Women: A Hate Song‖ reveals how Parker‘s categories overlap with the recluse‘s ―ideal‖ woman. The ideology of the ―ideal‖ matches the ideal that a crazy man has culled from the illustrations, fiction, advertising, and stories of magazines. However, this poem shows that Parker had already developed the primary subject (and aesthetic) for her work before she worked at Vanity Fair. She developed this focus in part through her association with proper, upper class, fashion-oriented, money-driven women working for Edna Chase at Vogue. Focusing on social roles, gendered habits of interaction, hypocrisy, and ―women‘s language‖ in an aesthetic of witty humor helped Parker create a professional authorial identity at Vanity Fair. Parker‘s later ―Slackers: A Hate Song‖ shows how contradictory messages intensified during American involvement in WWI. This poem, which berates conscientious objectors, socialists, business men, or anyone else who doesn‘t support the war effort, shares the page with a large sketch of heavy weaponry, and a series of satiric sketches lampooning the false sacrifices of wealthy families (―The Wartime Sacrifices of Our Best Families‖ December 1917, 82). Life, well known for its WWI imagery, often ran full page patriotic illustrations/advertisements in Vanity Fair (see, for example, July 1917, 15). However, the messages of the advertisers and the magazine did not always mesh. Hundreds of companies used the rhetoric of patriotism to sell their products during the war, from The Glen Springs‘s claim that ―it is your patriotic duty to keep well‖ to the Campbell‘s slogan: ―At study, work or at fun, I go like a Yank on a Hun‖ (Glen Springs ad July 1918, p3; Campbell‘s ads May 1918, p 89; Dec 1918, p 67). The message of the advertisers, not surprisingly, is that it‘s okay to be at home during wartime so long as you consume. A full page entreaty from the George Batten Advertising Company‘s advises readers not to ―fall into the easy sacrifice of giving up your goods‖ and Vanity Fair warned readers in an editorial that ―indiscriminate and hysterical economy threatens to demoralize the business life of

66 the nation‖ (July 1917, 2).23 With a husband fighting in the war, however, Parker disagreed with the messages equating consumerism with patriotism, which she expressed in ―Slackers.‖24 Parker continued to work for Vanity Fair through the end of the war, through an actor‘s strike (which she supported), and through a difficult year with her husband when he returned from occupation duty in Germany in August of 1919 addicted to painkillers. Parker‘s career changed dramatically when, in a comparatively mild theater review in 1919, Parker compared Billie Burke‘s performance in a play to Eva Tanguay, a contemporary exotic dancer. Parker exposed the ways Ziegfield unquestioningly embraced ideal female representations. But Burke was the wife of Florenz Ziegfield, a Broadway producer and a major advertiser in Vanity Fair. The editor, Crowninshied, thought nothing of it until after it was published and he received an angry letter from Ziegfield. Crowninshield fired Parker rather than further elicit anger from his advertisers. The power of consumer society to support these representations is revealed by Parker‘s dismissal from the job. On January 25, 1920, Parker left Vanity Fair (although she finished her contracted theater criticism through March). The mechanisms that drive Parker‘s aesthetic—brevity, dialogic structure, repetition, humor, a focus on language, and the use of representative character types— remain rebelliously strong in her work during this period.25

23 This full page ad continues, ―You feel a particular shock as this truth hits you. ‗I want to sacrifice my goods and my comfort to prove my devotion, but what I must do is augment my goods and maintain my comfort to meet the demands of a situation bigger than my present vision can comprehend.‖ Vanity Fair’s editorial was an introduction to ―On Undiscriminating Economy‖ by Howard Coffin, representative of the National Council on Defense (July 1917, 31). 24 In WWII, her second husband, Alan Campbell also volunteered for war service. In a letter to Alexander Woolcott, Parker relates the day she went with Campbell to the train station to see him off to war. The anecdote expresses the intense emotion inherent in sending one‘s husband to war. A woman at the train station asked Parker if the men were ―poor suckers caught in the draft‖ and Parker, in a moment of ―almighty wrath‖ said, ―Those are American patriots who have volunteered to fight for your liberty, you Sheeny bitch!‖ She was horrified by the language she used; she lamented to Woollcott: ―The things I have fought against all my life. And that‘s what I did.‖ Letter addressed from Fox House Pipersville, Bucks County, PA, September 2, 1942 (Kinney, 348). 25 Parker published in four new venues in 1920: Ainslee’s, the New York Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Parker contracted as a theater critic for Ainslee’s and wrote a monthly column titled ―In the Broadway Playhouses‖ through 1923. After first contributing to Life, a national humor magazine, in September of 1920, she published poetry and prose almost weekly in the magazine through 1927. Her relationship with The Saturday Evening Post was strong and she appeared frequently through 1923. Biographers claim Parker‘s relationship with The Saturday Evening Post ended after she got into an argument with the magazine‘s editor at a dinner party in 1923.

Ladies’ Home Journal

In 1920, Parker published four long sketches in Ladies’ Home Journal, which targeted women in the lower and middle classes and relied heavily on fiction and advice to push its circulation over one million subscribers. This mass circulation venue remained heavily invested in domestic models of womanhood, even as late as 1920. The magazine recognized changes to the True Woman, but used the language of feminism to support domesticity and motherhood. Parker‘s work is framed as uncomplicated humor in the magazine, a strategy she used to reach a massive audience and to secure a paycheck after losing her position at Vanity Fair. Her sketches for Ladies’ Home Journal anthologize a list of appropriate gender roles and expectations for women but subvert these representation through irony, mimicry, repetition, hyperbole, humor, and a focus on language and categories. The sketches‘ juxtaposition with the magazine‘s hybrid of domestically-oriented fiction, advertising, and essays highlights the intense significance of her message. Parker‘s tenure with Ladies’ Home Journal began in a watershed year for the magazine. In 1920, long time editor Edward Bok left the Journal, and female suffrage and Prohibition— two political events of great importance to the magazine‘s female audience—went into effect. Edward Bok, a traditionalist, had been anti-suffrage from the beginning and felt that any form of advocacy for women‘s rights, independence, or self-determination would cause the home to suffer.26 ―When a woman speaks of her home as being narrow,‖ he wrote, ―she does not mean so much that her home is narrow, as she does that she herself has made it narrow (qtd in Damon- Moore 159). Not surprisingly, Ladies’ Home Journal was one of the few magazines that did not shift its stance on suffrage in the late 1910s to reflect the growing certainty of its passage. In much the same way that Vanity Fair served elite classes, Ladies’ Home Journal served as a kind of ―handbook‖ for middle class readers. The readers of mass-circulation women‘s magazines were geographically and economically diverse, including new immigrants, rural readers, and women living in the city. Much of the content of these magazines imitated the aesthetics of upper-class publications because their readers had upward mobility aspirations. Ladies’ Home Journal, however, desired to elevate the public‘s tastes and morals through

26 For a discussion of how the Ladies’ Home Journal changed under Bok‘s direction early in the magazine‘s history, see chapter three of Helen Damon Moore‘s Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post 1880-1910. She argues that under the magazine‘s first (female) editor the magazine supported an ideology of ―real‖ womanhood, while under Bok the ideology shifted to True Womanhood.

68 consumerism, blurring the distinctions between high and low culture that publications like Vanity Fair were actively working to reify.27 Ladies’ Home Journal relied on serial fiction and short stories to raise its circulation, allowing Parker to break away from of the nonfiction and poetry genres required by Vanity Fair and Vogue. Because of the record circulation numbers for the magazine, we know that this fiction was very popular among readers. Editors spent a lot of time soliciting good fiction, and well-known fiction writers could garner top prices of one to five thousand dollars for a single story. Mary Ellen Zuckerman contends that magazine fiction, editorials, and service departments show women as self-sacrificing, with home and children first, while only the articles on social and political issues showed contradictory messages of capable women (Zuckerman 92).28 Jennifer Scanlon disagrees with this prevailing argument. She claims that the stories in Ladies’ Home Journal ―promise happy lives through traditional means, but expose those means—and those ends—as less than satisfying for women,‖ showing us that middle class definitions of womanhood didn‘t really fit middle class women‘s lives (Scanlon 139, 142). The mixed messages in Ladies’ Home Journal indicate that the audience for the magazine was straining against the burden of domesticity and family. The amount of advice about marriage, housework, children, and social etiquette after WWI shows women were unsure how to proceed in the new cultural environment carved out by the changes of the war. Ladies’ Home Journal’s answer was to recognize cultural changes but ultimately to reify a gender ideology that primarily valued women‘s service, and celebrated the roles of wife and mother. A 1920 article, ―What the Newest New Woman Is,‖ reads:

I believe in women‘s rights; but I believe in women‘s sacrifices also. I believe in women‘s freedom; but I believe it should be within the restrictions of the Ten Commandments. I believe in women‘s suffrage; but I believe many other things are vastly more important.

27 For a complete discussion of how such distinctions were reified in the first place, see Lawrence Levine‘s Highbrow/Lowbrow. For a more magazine-specific discussion, see the introduction to Carolyn Hitch‘s The Girl on the Magazine Cover (2001). Also see Warren Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1984). He argues that producers wanting to instruct and construct a group of people as consumers led them to aspire to the middle class, which produced tension and contradiction within the culture. 28 Zuckerman also notes the tension between the use of new technology and management techniques to streamline housework and the fear of what would happen if women no longer devoted themselves to this work full time.

I believe in women‘s assertion of self; but I believe also in her obligation of service to her family, her nation and her god. Following that faith we have the most modern expression of feminism. The newest New Woman deifies not herself, but through her new freedom elects to serve others. Articles such as ―Dishwashing as a Fine Art,‖ and ―Why I Hate my Independence‖ reinforced such ideas. ―A Woman‘s True Preparedness,‖ however, warns that women should learn a profession secretly so they will be ready in case of abandonment, divorce, or the death of their husbands (August 1920).29 Again, the hybrid nature of magazines paired with a desire for millions of readers led Ladies’ Home Journal to include widely contradictory content. The short story ―Elizabeth-Convex,‖ for example, is the story of a young woman working as a stenographer. ―For eight hours a day,‖ the narrative reads, ―Elizabeth sat at her desk in a government office in Washington and typed…She did her work well and loathed it with her whole soul‖ (Estelle Aubrey Brown January 1920). Eventually, the heroine in the story goes after her boss as a husband and is rewarded with matrimony and domesticity. In another story, ―Let‘s Pretend,‖ the female narrator tells her husband, ―Feminism…given a fair chance, may be all right—for the superman and superwoman. It is not to be recommended, however, to just plain folks. To them, husband o‘mine, for us, I prescribe the ordinary, old-fashioned, garden variety of love—before and after meals, and in between time‖ (Eleanor Kinsella McDonnel July 1920). In this story, the couple reads in ―Adventures of Feminism‖ that a married couple should spend time apart. They follow the advice and agree to take a ship voyage and pretend not to know each other. The resulting jealousy almost tears them apart. The article ―Why I Hate My Independence‖ reinforced readers‘ understanding of independence and ambition as unrewarding and dangerous for women and their heterosexual marriages (Eleanor Gilbert March 1920). Short stories and serial stories nearly always centered on a woman‘s quest for happiness—eventually found in marriage, motherhood, and/or housekeeping.30

29 ―Dishwashing as a Fine Art,‖ by Eleanor Cochran Reed, is a first person account celebrates the joys of scientific housekeeping: ―After I had ended the morning‘s work, my spirit came to life again, my imagination woke and tingled, and in a flood of feeling I wrote out the first poem that had come to me since I had entered on the great adventure.‖ (82). ―A Woman‘s True Preparedness‖ by Hilda Richmond says women could be constantly preparing for a paying position ―so quietly that no one would ever suspect‖ (100). 30 In these stories and articles, and in the dozens of advertisements endorsing domesticity, submissiveness, and family, readers saw this ideal endorsed as the ultimate expression of womanhood. The housekeeping advice, however, was not without its own contradictions. A Libby‘s canned food advertising campaign warned women they

The magazine‘s contradictory messages about consumption were complicated by the fact that the magazine relied on advertising for profit. ―Thrift and American Women,‖ a prominent article by Herbert Hoover in August 1920, included an illustration of a woman in a war uniform, complete with rifle and bayonet, standing atop a giant checkbook—―the Guardian of the American Pocketbook.‖ At the same time, advertisements claimed that expensive soaps, face treatments, clothing, cars, electric vacuums, new canned foods, kitchen cabinets, linoleum, and washing machines created proper wives and mothers. To help pay for these items, women could sells subscriptions: ―Keep up with your friends,‖ the magazine promised. ―Yes, you can afford it, though you do need more money‖ (Girl‘s Club‖ advertisement. Aug 1920, 80). A contradictory ideology of thrift and consumerism pervaded the magazine, and reflected the opposing goals of the mass circulation magazine industry—moral and social edification, entertainment, and profit. To understand Parker‘s placement in this journal, it is necessary to look at the ―joke‖ page, as this is where Ladies’ Home Journal positioned Parker‘s work. Although many magazines whose primary vehicle was humor, such as Punch, Judge, and the New York Life, were typically directed at men, Ladies’ Home Journal also reserved a few pages at the front or back of each issue to jokes, humorous verse, aphorisms, and the like.31 An August 1920 poem, ―The Thermos Bottle,‖ which appeared next to an illustration of a Thermos with a Zebra‘s legs and face, is representative:

The friendly Thermos Bottle Is a handy beast to know If you‘re going on a picnic Or to a baby show. He will hold your liquid luncheon And keep it cold or hot, But to use him, we remove his head, were too absorbed by their housework—―Perhaps this is why your husband doesn‘t talk to you,‖ one ad cautions. Other advertisements and articles stressed the importance of immaculately cleaned homes and children, one warning women not to be ―can-opener cooks,‖ providing plenty of mixed messages to women. 31 A variously titled section by Jay House and N.A. Lufbarrow, and ―The Office Dog—Scraps that He Picks Up Here, There, and Everywhere‖ served this function most months. The humor in these pages was typically anecdotal, such as this one from May 1920, titled ―Only if She Could‖:―Young man,‖ said an inquisitive old lady to a conductor of an electrically-driven train, ―if I put my foot on that rail shall I receive an electric shock?‖ ―No, mum,‖ he replied, ―unless you place your other foot on the overhead wire.‖

A tragedy, is it not?

Parker‘s first sketch in Ladies’ Home Journal, ―Our Tuesday Club,‖ ran on page four, a premium space typically occupied by this ―joke‖ page. The June issue of the magazine publicized the sketch‘s location on its ―Looking Forward with the Editor‖ page. In large type, the announcement reads:

Another noteworthy feature is the amusing anthology whose characters you ought to be able to identify in your own community. OUR TUESDAY CLUB, by Dorothy Parker. Appearing next month for the first time in the Home Journal; to be on page 4.

In this way, Ladies’ Home Journal positioned Parker‘s sketch as an ―amusing‖ piece for the joke page, right in line with ―The Thermos Bottle.‖ M.L. Bloomenthal, the illustrator for the usual joke page, also provided the images for Parker‘s sketch—a light-hearted illustration of seven older women and a male butler at the top and an inset of an amused woman playfully covering another woman‘s eyes toward the bottom of the page. Parker‘s sketch, then, is framed by subscribers‘ expectations that this space in the magazine is for humor. The consistency of the illustrator‘s style between the usual joke page and Parker‘s sketch enforces this expectation, while the seven women in the illustration invite readers to decide which woman is which in the sketch (as suggested in the June announcement). The direct address to the reader in a caption— ―my dear‖—draws readers into the sketch with a combination of colloquial diction and implied intimacy between the author and reader. The June announcement, the placement of the sketch on the typical joke page, and the illustrations and captions prepare readers to encounter Parker‘s sketch as a truthful and humorous first-person account of a middle-aged, middle-class woman‘s experience with her ―Tuesday‖ friends. Combined with expectations of humor, women preparing to read Parker‘s sketch would expect to recognize themselves and their friends in the pages to follow, and to laugh at the recognition. While Parker‘s work is indeed witty, ―Our Tuesday Club‖ is more than just a simple addition to the joke page. Parker‘s sketch is divided into eight sections, each an individual treatment of one woman in the club—those ―characters you ought to be able to identify in your own community.‖ Each section is a description of a character from the point of view of a friendly narrator who seems to be a part of the Tuesday Club. Each description is focused on one aspect of the woman‘s life or personality. Even more than her work for Vogue and Vanity Fair, Parker

72 uses this space to expose the social construction of gendered behavior in a way that reveals the incredible self-deception required to maintain these ironically false behaviors. Parker‘s Ladies’ Home Journal sketches are important because she was one of few magazine writers communicating these ideas to such a largely conservative, domestic, female audience, especially in a publishing market whose primary goal was to sell advertising space above all else. At the same time, these sketches are a revealing object of study because their appearance in the mass- circulation Ladies’ Home Journal distinguishes them from her work for elitist mid-circulation magazines. Parker not only put her ideas in front of this audience, but also reached them. This same audience would later declare her success by rocketing her first book of poetry, Sunset Gun, onto the all-time bestseller list in 1928 and effectively sealing Parker‘s position as an American literary celebrity. While the title ―Our Tuesday Club‖ implies a first-person narrative, Parker‘s sketch is in third person. There is an implied speaker providing the insider information and character details in each character overview, but the voice maintains an ironic distance from the narrative itself. The piece opens with Miss Harriet Meeker: For the last decade, now, every time that Miss Meeker‘s friends are gathered together—in the absence of Miss Meeker—someone is certain to ―wonder why it is that Hettie Meeker has never married; she‘d make such a splendid wife for some man.‖ From constant repetition the speculation has rather lost its initial zest; in fact, the remark has come to be delivered a bit perfunctorily… The first section of ―Our Tuesday Club‖ is representative of the other seven sections. Parker introduces a woman from the club, focusing on one particular aspect of their lives and/or personalities. Here, it is Miss Meeker‘s inability to find a husband. Miss Meeker represents a type of woman, one who is overly excited by her domestic possibilities. The reason she hasn‘t found a husband, the speaker asserts, is that Miss Meeker is simply too enthusiastic. She would be ―the most enthusiastically exemplary of helpmates, almost aggressively contented with her home, resolutely good-humored, violently proud of her spouse, fiercely faithful, breathlessly interested in his every concern.‖ The overwhelming power of the adverbs in this description undermine the professed positive attitude about Miss Meeker, hammering home the reality that Miss Meeker is herself overwhelming. In this narrative, her powerful desire to serve and love a man is a little frightening.

Considering the ideology that the Ladies Home Journal has invested in, Parker took a risk by claiming a woman can be too overwhelmingly excited about the prospect of serving those around her. The Newest New Woman, after all, chooses to subsume herself for the benefit of others. Miss Meeker, however, is especially off-putting because she is like an ―overzealous salesman,‖ intimidating ―potential customers‖ with such a ―lavish display.‖ Her friends, too, happened to head up an ―injudicious advertising‖ campaign. Here, Parker picked up on the same business rhetoric Edna Ferber used in her Emma McChesney stories. Parker used the market- based rhetoric of dating and marriage to expose the ways the system of profit and exchange promoted by Ladies’ Home Journal and other entertainment venues was harmful to women. Reading advice manuals, stories about marriage, and pages of advertising, Miss Meeker has internalized a set of ideologies that require intense self-deception to maintain. Her friends, for example, recognize that ―the reason for her celibacy is as well known to them as it is to Miss Meeker herself.‖ Nonetheless, they still make certain to ―wonder why it is that Hettie Meeker has never married.‖ Like in Ferber‘s Emma McChesney series, an unmarried woman is a point of contention. The sketch of Miss Meeker is typical of each of the eight sketches, as each woman is unhappy in some way, deceiving herself, isolated from other women despite the expected camaraderie and intimacy of a weekly club. Domestic values, then, separate women from female community. A prominent aspect of this self-deception and isolation is language. Women‘s language is central to Parker‘s investigation of types in ―Our Tuesday Club.‖ In a magazine like Ladies’ Home Journal, much of the language in fiction and articles is meant to be invisible, merely there to convey a plot or an idea in as clear a way as possible. Parker, however, brings language to the forefront in two ways. First, her own language is colloquial, biting, and carefully crafted. Secondly, her narrator discusses the club women‘s language as a means to explain the power of words to affect change. The ―publicity campaign‖ for Miss Meeker is one example of how women are taught use language to reinforce, rather than challenge, mainstream representations of women. Members of the Tuesday Club are also overzealous, overly self-effacing (what Parker called a ―Good Soul‖ in a June 1919 Vanity Fair piece), overly exhausted without reason, overly afraid of germs, overly morbid, and overly youthful-acting. They are naïve, and overly sweet: one woman has finely wrinkled eyes ―as if from the effects of a constant glare. It comes, perhaps,

74 from looking too persistently on the sunny side‖ (much like the ―Cheerful‖ woman in ―Women: A Hate Song‖). Importantly, it isn‘t the individual personality trait that is most important to Parker. Instead, it is the self-absorption and self-deception required by ideologies promoting young women marry at any cost that she is criticizing. Most of the characters Parker includes in her sketch are caught up in the deception, unable to recognize the blind spots in the ideologies legitimated by magazines. Parker‘s message in the description of another member of the Tuesday Club, Miss Frances Parsons, clearly reveals the damage women can inflict on each other because of being caught by destructive ideologies. In this case, the negative systems of patriarchy and market capitalism force acceptance upon women. Miss Frances Parsons was ―slaving away in a bank, a secretary to the president‖ when her younger sister married and insisted she leave the bank to live with her family. All of the members of the club ―love to recall‖ how Mrs. Swain allowed Frances to plan all the meals, to supervise the servants, to assume charge of all the household accounts; how, in addition to even that important position, now there are two little Swains, Frances has been assigned to the post of resident maiden aunt. As the sketch continues, Parker elaborates on Frances‘ luck at having such a generous sister. However, the sketch ends, But there! Isn‘t it true that some people never know when they are well off? When Mrs. Throop walked into her room unannounced the other day, there was Frances crying her eyes out, with her head on the cover of that old typewriter that she used to have down at the bank. While it was not unusual for an unmarried woman to take a position as a stenographer, secretary, or teacher, it was generally understood that she was only performing this work because she had no family of her own to care for. Parker reveals the falsity of this notion through an ironic aesthetic of reversal and understatement. The preceding list of tasks encourages readers to see Frances‘ lot as ironically unfulfilling, against the speaker‘s cheery opinion and tone. Parker‘s complex narrative strategy presents readers with only one reaction at the end—sympathy with Frances for the multiple ways she was forced to give up her ambitions and sense of self because of the close-minded domestic ideology held by her sister.

The audience for Ladies’ Home Journal was aware that they were living in a rapidly changing world, and the magazine attempted to sort out some of those changes for its readers. However, Ladies’ Home Journal maintained a steady opinion when it came to a woman‘s choice between family and work. There was no choice—a good woman always chose family. After all, ―The newest New Woman deifies not herself, but through her new freedom elects to serve others.‖ In view of this ideology, Frances‘s fit of crying doesn‘t make sense, nor does the reader‘s sympathy for Frances. The edgy line Parker drew in the sand between acceptable and unacceptable female behaviors likely left some readers unsure how they were supposed to react to the portrayals. The ideal of a woman who subsumes herself to the needs of others that Ladies Home Journal and other ideological and cultural vehicles presented was represented in a very unflattering light in Parker‘s sketch. Parker implies that it is advice like that doled out in this same issue—―women need, not more independence, but more realization of interdependence‖— that has perpetually kept women in the role of servile victim.32 Parker is often criticized for not providing a ―twelve-step program‖ to rectify the alienation, subjugation, and deception she so scathingly reveals.33 However, leaving readers to contemplate their own alternatives signifies Parker‘s belief in the power of women to learn how best to survive and thrive in a changing world. Men garner only a passing mention in the sketch, leaving it to women themselves to shape their worlds as best they can. Ladies’ Home Journal presented ―Our Tuesday Club‖ to readers as a humor column by placing it in the ―joke page‖ slot and including funny illustrations and captions. In this way, Parker‘s radical message was downplayed and packaged as a witty joke on readers. The sketch had the potential to present readers with a new, complexly-layered discourse about women‘s language, relationships, and sense of self that contradicted the prevailing discourse of Ladies’ Home Journal and other mass-circulation women‘s magazines. Parker extended the feminist and progressive discourse popular before WWI into a conservative venue that celebrated the post- WWI reversion to strictly domestic roles for women. Her sketch reveals how constructions of class and gender intensified by the post WWI-period, especially the philosophy that one should be ―true‖ to oneself, require self-deception (equally through either self-involvement or self-

32 The Editor‘s Page. Ladies’ Home Journal (July 1920). This same editorial encourages women to reject unions and strikes. Of organizers, the editor warns, ―certain of these parasites are presumably paid incendiaries from the bankrupt colony of murderers in what was once Russia.‖ Good workers, the editors claim, would never consider working fewer than ten hours in a day. 33 This telling phrase comes from Regina Barreca‘s introduction to the Penguin Complete Stories.

76 effacement) to achieve even a false state of happiness. Dorothy Parker‘s ―Our Tuesday Club‖ was compelling to these readers because she presented the effects of restrictive social categories on women, allowing them the chance to take a step back from the categories and explore their own alternatives. The humor and colloquial language of her sketch made it palatable to conservative editors and readers alike, and this first Ladies’ Home Journal publication led to three more publications in the magazine in 1920. While much of Parker‘s work has been reprinted over the century, Parker‘s final piece for Ladies’ Home Journal, ―The Education of Gloria,‖ has not been reprinted. Because Parker herself arranged her first collected works, she may not have wanted this piece to represent her. It is a biting satire of upper class pretensions. The sketch focuses on mother/daughter interactions as a way to challenge the legitimization of gender ideologies across generations. Gloria‘s mother, Mrs. Tomlinson, wants to instill a socially exclusive set of values in her daughter. Gloria, the sketch informs readers, ―was congenitally equipped with a restfully uninquiring mind, an amiable submissiveness of spirit, a readily formative point of view,‖ affirming the passive voice of the sketch‘s title. Gloria‘s ―amiable submissiveness‖ leaves her quite open to whatever form of education happens to come along. Luckily for Gloria, her mother is an expert at ―twig- bending‖ and thus There will never be any danger of [Gloria] developing into one of those frightful democratic women, for which her mother daily returns appropriate thanks to an indulgent Providence; Gloria will never succumb to any current notion to concern herself with community betterment, which would necessitate her mingling almost freely with her inferiors and thus spoiling them completely. Through irony, Parker highlights the danger inherent in class-based rhetorics of exclusivity. Parker‘s narrator is ironically cheerful about the path of Gloria‘s life. This education is not Gloria‘s; it‘s her mothers, as emphasized by the passive tense of the title. Gloria‘s perfect emulation of Mrs. Tomlinson‘s habits of mind and speech, emphasized throughout the sketch, readers see, will reproduce another woman isolated by an ideology that seems to privilege her status but in reality traps her in a set of constrictive social regulations. The sketch ends with a brief bit on the effects of ignorance: Other girls, who have not had the advantage of such careful upbringing, may marry socially obscure or even poor young men, with some hysterical notion of making their

way together; but not so a girl of Gloria‘s high ideals. When the right time comes—and it is fairly safe to say that Mrs. Tomlinson will be the judge of that –Mrs. Tomlinson knows that she can trust her own little Gloria to follow the dictates of her mother‘s heart. Dozens of romances printed in Ladies’ Home Journal emphasize the importance of romantic ideals about true love and soul mates to the enforcement of domestic ideologies. ―The Education of Gloria‖ reveals the reality of the marriage market while also showing how it reinforces a deceptive class structure. Gloria will certainly choose a man based not on romantic ideals of true love but on practical social considerations. The self-deception here lies in Mrs. Tomlinson‘s belief that she is protecting her daughter and being good to those ―inferior‖ classes. Part of the narrative complexity of the sketch is in the way readers receive the characters. Upwardly- aspiring readers want to be in Mrs. Tomlinson‘s position, but if they get there, will they too unwittingly accept the class ideologies that replicate deceptive selfhood throughout the generations? In Parker‘s worldview, the answer is definitely ―yes.‖ In Parker‘s texts, there is no escape. The repetition of categories across years of poems, sketches, and essays indicates that Parker saw little promise for an authentic state of happiness and self-awareness for American women. In her final Ladies’ Home Journal essay, she experiments with the more narrow scope she would eventually master in ―A Pretty Little Picture‖ just a few years later and that she would continue to explore in her famous stories ―The Waltz‖ and, in a more extended fashion, ―Big Blonde.‖ Her modern aesthetic of irony, repetition, understatement, humor, and dialogic structure was sturdily in place by 1920, as was her thematic focus on the intense alienation and self-deception characteristic of Progressive-era women‘s lives and language choices. Parker honed these skills against the sharp edge of a heavily enforced ideology in early twentieth century mid- and mass-circulation print culture. Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Ladies’ Home Journal each targeted different groups of Americans. Parker understood each audience and used the ideological registers of the magazines as a jumping off place from which to begin her narratives. Focusing on beauty for Vogue, the stage for Vanity Fair, and women‘s clubs for Ladies’ Home Journal, Parker challenged women to recognize the socially constructed nature of their behaviors. Only then, Parker believed, could women begin to resist, or even transform, the representations available to them. In the end, Parker‘s work indicates that Progressive-era culture, with its confusing amalgamation of ideologies and change, requires a level of self-deception new to American culture to survive. The change, confusion, conflict,

78 advertising rhetoric, and consumer culture that burgeoned during the 1910s, Parker believes, led to this intense self-deceptive happiness, especially for women. Parker‘s early magazine writing had the potential to present readers with a new, complexly-layered discourse about women‘s language, relationships, and sense of self that contradicted the prevailing discourse of many mass-circulation magazines. Her work was compelling to these readers because she presented the effects of restrictive social categories on women, allowing them the chance to take a step back from the categories and explore their own alternatives.

Chapter Three

Gertrude Stein as Debutante in Vanity Fair and the Little Review

When Gertrude Stein began publishing in Vanity Fair magazine in 1917, her work became part of the discourse of a magazine dedicated to chronicling the progress of American life ―cheerfully, truthfully, and entertainingly.‖ Despite the professed goals of the magazine, this discourse also offered conservative and limiting representations of women in its pages. Women were often represented as spectacle/object (actresses in flimsy clothing, smoking cigarettes or drinking) or as mother/homemaker. Stein‘s Vanity Fair work rejects these representations. Using a circuitous, defamiliarizing style while simultaneously relying on readers‘ familiarity with her style (made famous in the periodical press), Stein rethinks available representations of women and authors. She presents transformative representations—ranging from expatriate war workers to independent female communities—in their place. Stein‘s Little Review work employs similar techniques, although her appearance in a modernist little magazine necessitated different strategies for opening up new representational possibilities for women and writers. The negotiations and strategies discussed here illustrate the ways Stein deployed her person, pages, and language to manage the complex sociopolitical terrain of early twentieth century magazine publishing. This study uses Vanity Fair and the Little Review as focal points of inquiry into intersections of gender, modernism, and periodical culture in Gertrude Stein‘s early career. The rhetoric used by Vanity Fair and the Little Review to illicit positive responses to Gertrude Stein‘s early works highlight not only the negative publicity she had received in the American press as a woman of excess, a bohemian and a ―faker‖ but also the publicity she received in the forms of imitation and parody in the 1910s and 1920s. Analyzing Stein‘s work in both a mid-circulation popular magazine, Vanity Fair, and a low-circulation little magazine, the Little Review, highlights continuities and breaks between these venues and also reveals many of the pressures and rewards for female magazine writers in the early twentieth century. Stein‘s expatriate status, her unusually open, long-term lesbian relationship, and her difficult, experimental style made her an enigma among her contemporaries. However, especially before the career-changing success of her 1934 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and her subsequent American lecture tour, Stein‘s appearance in both popular and modernist venues offers rich material for comparison. In an article examining the publication history of The Waste Land,

Edward Bishop notes that Vanity Fair and the Little Review were both on the short list of places Eliot considered for his poem.34 He argues, however, that ―in Vanity Fair, The Waste Land would have been next to pictures of movie stars; in the Little Review, in good company but isolated from the mainstream‖ (311). Bishop fails to note here that Vanity Fair had already published not only T.S. Eliot, but also many of his contemporaries. One wonders how Vanity Fair would have packaged The Waste Land. While we can only imagine which movie star‘s face would have graced the page opposite it, we can examine how Vanity Fair chose to present a writer whose work has had arguably more impact than T.S. Eliot‘s, as well as whether being ―isolated from the mainstream‖ affected the reception and meaning of Stein‘s work in the Little Review. Surprisingly, little has been done to analyze Stein‘s connection to popular culture and its relation to her presentation in little magazines. Early Stein scholarship often focused on Stein‘s ―readable‖ prose works, those Kostenlanetz terms ―the simple ones‖—namely, Three Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Everybody’s Autobiography. These works, along with Wars I Have Seen, provide the literary touchstones with which scholars are familiar, and which provide many a basis for critical investigation: narrative trajectory, character development, structure, and social and biographical connection. Another vein of scholarship takes up these connections and, like American readers of the 1910s, 20s and 30s, pays specific attention to Gertrude Stein, the person. These critical works are important because her ―readable‖ works are the most popular and can provide an entry point for understanding Stein‘s work. However, such scholarship threatens to ignore Stein‘s literary contributions to modernism by favoring her life over her art. Although largely unread before the 1960s, one of Stein‘s earliest works, The Making of Americans, became a major text and requisite reading for Stein scholars after the 1963 release of Leon Katz‘s Columbia University dissertation ―The First Making of ‗The Making of Americans‘: A Study Based on Gertrude Stein‘s Notebooks and Early Versions of Her Novel.‖ This study, based on Katz‘s discovery of Stein‘s 1902-1908 personal notebooks at the Yale University Library, and on personal interviews between Katz and Alice B. Toklas in the 1950s, uncovered information about Stein‘s life and writing process and, perhaps most importantly, critical evidence of the progression of her ideas about human personality and language. The

34 Edward Bishop, ―Re:Covering Modernism: Format and Function in the Little Magazines‖ in Modernist Writers in the Marketplace, Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds. New York: St Martin‘s Press, 1996.

Making of Americans has become such a touchstone, in fact, that the 7th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature includes a long excerpt of the novel, along with a shorter excerpt from the ‗easier‘ Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This move by Norton may relieve some misgivings Stein scholars have felt about Katz‘s failure to publish the Yale notebooks, which many feel is the impetus that would propel the work onto college reading lists.35 This chapter, like nearly all Stein scholarship since the 1960s, is informed by the biographical connections Katz confirms in his dissertation. A new generation of Stein critics have elucidated the ways that Stein‘s Jewishness, gender, sexuality, nationality, upbringing, personal relationships and education influenced her literary experimentation and philosophies. Shari Benstock, for example, meticulously examines Stein‘s split with her brother Leo in order to rewrite histories claiming that Stein‘s geographical relocations and her decision to attend Harvard were efforts to follow her brother‘s life. Benstock analyses the links between sexuality and textuality, also effectively revising the early idea that Stein‘s difficult works have ―no meaning.‖ Scholars of print culture and mass culture explore the ways Stein‘s words, style, and image were circulated in different levels of American print culture from the turn of the century through the 1930s. Bryce Conrad, for example, traces Stein‘s early problems with publication, the ―crisis of recognition‖ that led her to change her style for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and her unprecedented (and unexpected) celebrity during her 1930s lecture tour to the United States (215). While Laura Behling claims that Conrad‘s article explores ―the neglect‖ of Stein by the American marketplace, what Conrad actually does is explain how differently two businesses in that marketplace treated her (151).36 Publishers, in large part, did neglect Stein. However, Conrad also notes that the newspaper and nonliterary magazine market took Stein‘s words and image and ran with it. He paints a portrait of a Stein who was confused by the American marketplace, unable to control the commodification of her media image, and eventually tortured by the compromises she felt she had made. Despite Stein‘s desire for readership, Conrad concludes, ―ultimately, the American market would accept Stein

35 Janet Malcolm, in the 2005 New Yorker article ―Someone Says Yes to It: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and ‗The Making of Americans‘,‖ reported, ―They [Stein scholars, specifically Dydo, Burns, and Rice] believe that had Katz fulfilled his early promise as the preeminent authority on ‗The Making of Americans‘ Stein‘s novel could well be on college readings lists today. They feel that the surge of criticism necessary to propel a work into the academic canon would have followed upon the publication of the annotated notebooks.‖ 36 Behling takes on one of Conrad‘s central arguments in his 1995 article. She claims that Vanity Fair was not the open promoter of experiment Conrad claims, showing that Vanity Fair performed a heterosexual rewrite of ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene‖ a few months after they published Stein‘s version.

82 only according to the formula that she most wanted to avoid—that of the writer valued not for her art but for her sensationalized personality‖ (233). However, Stein seemed to enjoy her celebrity; she saw it as a sign that the public appreciated her work. As Alyson Tischler notes, Stein hired a clipping service to keep track of any mention of her name, and as early as 1914 Stein appeared in advertisements, parodies, and, most famously, in Don Marquis‘s ―The Sun Dial‖ column after the release of Tender Buttons. Tischler recognizes that ―the juxtaposition of these mass-cultural and modernist texts in her papers throws a new light on recent critical discussions that have emerged in opposition to Andreas Huyssen‘s concept of ‗the great divide.‘‖ I argue here that Stein used her widespread popularity in the periodical press and the commodification of her celebrity persona to find an audience for her transformation of available representations of female roles, images, and sexualities. Scholars such as Ulla Dydo, Barbara Will, Janet Malcolm, and Jessica Rabin have used a cultural lens to examine the ways Stein‘s work interacts within her historical moment as a philosophical exploration of gender, society, and American identity. By juxtaposing an analysis of Stein‘s early work in Vanity Fair with her early work and positioning in the Little Review, I hope to continue this critical discussion. No longer can scholars reasonably claim that the great divide was enough to prevent cross-fertilization of ideas and work between artists and mass culture in early twentieth century America. In fact, Karen Leick argues that even low-rate journalists frequently read literary magazines in search of radical contributions and scanned vanity press books for material. Stein‘s Tender Buttons was only printed in a 1000-copy run, for example, but columnists quickly caught on to the value the text had for their columns. ―The Chicago Daily Tribune, for example, printed a spread of nineteen of the poems (or sections) in Tender Buttons, including the lengthy ‗A Piece of Coffee‘ and ‗A Plate,‘ with a large picture of Stein sitting at her desk‖ (Leick 128). Modernist writers, therefore, had an influence on mass print culture and on the hundreds of thousands of everyday Americans who read these publications. Feminist, cultural, print, and queer studies have revealed complex cultural exchanges between the ―highbrow‖ elites and the average American ―lowbrow‖ reader who skimmed magazines and newspapers as much for the entertainment and advertising as for cultural edification. As she writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein used this dynamic cultural exchange to her advantage: she ―always consoles herself that the newspapers are always interested. They always say, she says, that my writing is appalling but they always

83 quote it and what is more, they quote it correctly, and those they say they admire they do not quote‖ (78 qtd Leick 128). So by the time readers encountered Stein on the pages of Vanity Fair and the Little Review, there was a very good chance they had been influenced by the frequent quotation and parody of Stein in other print venues. Stein used this familiarity to take greater risks with the language and representations of women and sexuality in her work. For this reason, each venue felt the need to ―package‖ Stein in a way consistent with the goals and audience of their magazine. While publishing Gertrude Stein‘s work may have been a risk, both Vanity Fair and the Little Review stood to gain from the interaction. Both magazines, in different forms, promoted their own understanding of modernism, of modernist art‘s connection (or disconnect) with America and American values, and of the modernist movement‘s relationship to a particular audience. As editors and publishers, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Frank Crowninshield, and Conde Nast concentrated on presenting an edited, published account of modernist values and art. Each version is necessarily different. Each editor‘s decision (although often influenced by mutual friends of the editor and Stein) to publish Stein‘s works, and to present Stein‘s work in a specific manner, teaches us both about how Stein‘s writing was understood by practitioners of modernism, but also how Stein saw herself in relation to modernism. Gertrude Stein‘s willingness to be published in both Vanity Fair and the Little Review, even accepting editorial changes to some of her work, also indicates Stein‘s intense desire to communicate to any audience willing to read her work. As Ulla Dydo notes in The Language that Rises, ―Stein submitted new works to magazine and book publishers as soon as she finished them…and almost immediately sent out again what was returned‖ (14). Stein‘s papers include a ledger in which she recorded these submissions. Her submission list for ―Ada,‖ her 1910 portrait of Alice Toklas, includes McClure, American, English Review, Century, Forum, English Review, and Everybody’s—all marked ―returned‖ (15). Stein did not distinguish, it seems, between highbrow and middle brown venues. For example, McClure was credited with inventing muckraking, and when its staff (including Ida Tarbell) left over a dispute with McClure to begin American Magazine, McClure was forced to sell the magazine to his creditors, just one year after ―returning‖ Stein‘s submission. At the time of Stein‘s submission to Everybody’s, the magazine was best known for its own muckraking articles and high-paid fiction writers, with a circulation

84 of over 500,000 and over a hundred pages of advertising each issue (Mott 82-83). One London editor parodied Stein‘s style in his rejection: Dear Madam, I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being , one at the same time. …Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Many thanks. I am returning the M.S. by registered post. Only one M.S. by one post. Sincerely, A.C. Fifield (Stendhal)

While most editors continued to return Stein‘s manuscripts and submissions, Vanity Fair and the Little Review found value—whether literary, cultural, or monetary—in her work. After all, the magazine‘s subscription lists (however large or small) ensured that more than ―one copy would sell here.‖ The work Stein published in these venues mark the beginning of her magazine publishing history, a history dramatically altered by the success of her American lecture tour in the 1930s. The decisions each magazine made in their presentation of her work illuminate intersections of gender, sexuality, modernism, marketing, and literature that can help us continue to unpack the complexities of early twentieth century women‘s writing. Stein‘s poetry and sketches negotiate a space for an independent female author without compromising her aesthetic or her complex ideological positions.

Vanity Fair: The “High Priestess of Cubism” as Debutante

Gertrude Stein‘s work debuted in Vanity Fair in June 1917, only two months after America declared war against Germany, an event that profoundly affected the nation‘s magazines and the meaning of Stein‘s work within them. Anti-Allied sentiment among German- Americans and the largely pro-British and pro-French ideas of Atlantic coast businessmen represented a cleavage in opinion about the war in the United States.37 Even if Stein always

37 Vanity Fair declared its position beginning in January 1918 by printing a warning on its table of contents: ―Every German or Austrian in the United States unless known by years of association to be absolutely loyal should be treated as a potential spy.‖ Gertrude Stein‘s parents were of German-Jewish descent, and the first language young

85 claimed America as her ―hometown,‖ she was in all practical terms a resident of France. She and Alice B. Toklas were visiting a friend in England when war broke out in 1914 and were unable to return to Paris until that fall. They were forced to flee air raids on Paris in 1915, traveling to Barcelona, Mallorca, and Valencia. They returned to Paris in 1916, and Stein received ―Auntie,‖ her first American car in 1917. She and Toklas drove the Ford van as a supply truck for the American Fund for French Wounded, supplying hospitals and meeting American ―doughboys.‖ At the end of the war, the two distributed clothing and blankets to civilians and spent more time with American soldiers. Both received a medal of honor from the French government in 1918, and they returned to Rue de Fleurus for good in May 1919. While she would eventually incorporate her war experiences into her work, only one of Stein‘s Vanity Fair publications, ―The Great American Army,‖ addressed the war. Instead, much of her work for Vanity Fair represent a cross-section of her early writing, from language poems to sketches in the repetitive style of The Making of Americans. When Stein first appeared in Vanity Fair in June 1917, over one-third of the magazine‘s content focused on WWI. Rather than appearing ―next to pictures of movie stars‖ in Vanity Fair, Stein‘s first publication in the venue, ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled‖ appears next to ―Our Crowded War Time Portrait Album‖ and highlights the ways in which Vanity Fair framed Stein as an American patriot. However, Stein‘s piece does not overtly address her war experiences.38 Instead, it is a ―portrait‖ of Henry McBride, a prominent New York art critic. The sketch her poem shares the page with lists six new pictures now lining fashionable walls and pokes fun at the way debutantes, actresses, singers, and other privileged women are using the war to their advantage.39 Before moving to an analysis of the ways Stein‘s work negotiates the ideologies and representations of gender and female writers marketed by Vanity Fair, let us turn to a brief

Gertrude learned (while living with her family in Vienna, Austria) was German. However, as a child she quickly learned French as a second language while living in Paris, and as a resident of France in her adult life, she felt a dedication to the people and landscapes of France above any loyalty to the German cause. In light of these loyalties, and in light of her desire for an audience of ―strangers‖ to read her work, it is not surprising that Stein would agree to be published in a venue warning American readers to beware of Germans and Austrians. 38 The piece is listed under ―Miscellaneous,‖ as it did not fit into the magazine‘s other regular departments At the time of Stein‘s first publication, these departments included: Leading Article, In and About the Theater, The World of Art, All Seriousness Aside, The World Outdoors, Miscellaneous, and What They Wear in Vanity Fair. 39 For example, one picture is the ―Star Spangled Soprano.‖ The caption reads, ―Oh say, won‘t the Government stop all those stout actresses and singers from being photographed in an American flag peignoir, while singing our poor, massacred national anthem?‖ The other ―pictures‖ include the social register nurse, the brave war correspondent, the military wedding, the flower girl, and the munitions worker.

86 overview of the pages of the publication itself. Vanity Fair refused to print fiction, which Crowinshield felt was a ―builder whose constant tendency is to dilute ‗class‘ circulation.‖ However, Vanity Fair was unable to keep its solemn promise about protecting readers from articles about ―preparedness‖ or ―current events,‖ eventually bowing under the intense patriotic fervor of the country. As early as March 1916, the magazine printed ―Preparedness and the Ladies: How Women Can Combine Preparation with Watchful Waiting‖ (33).40 By 1917, Vanity Fair‘s language was infused with military rhetoric. For example, a June 1917 advertisement for Vanity Fair claims that reading their magazine will ―put your mind in its dress uniform and guide it through the most modern maneuvers‖ (4) and an October 1917 advertisement warns, ―Don‘t expose yourself to the bombs of boredom! Don‘t be stifled by the poison gasses of ennui!...Vanity Fair is carrying on ruthless warfare against the legions of gloom.‖ The magazine also printed articles about women‘s proper roles during the war. Elsewhere in the same issue as Stein‘s first publication in Vanity Fair (June 1917), for example, is the article ―The Amazing Mobilization of Our Women for the War: The Minute Girls of America,‖ by Nixola Greely- Smith. Despite Vanity Fair’s seemingly nonchalant views about women‘s roles, this article claims that if women continue running off to the Red Cross and spending all their time piling up supplies for soldiers, there will be no home for the men to fight for. Women need, instead, ―to study the needs of our own households and to conserve the welfare of our own children‖ (41). Harkening back to the ideology of True Womanhood, Greely-Smith argues that a woman‘s primary purpose in life is to marry, have children, and then protect her home by ―studying the needs‖ of her household and family. As a war worker in Paris, and a lesbian, Stein rejects the restrictive gender roles put forward by Greely-Smith‘s article. A perusal of any late-1910s or 1920s issue of Vanity Fair does nothing to dispel the popular cultural memory that marks the 1920s as a decadent, witty, glamorous age full of Chryslers and flappers. The magazine‘s monthly Shopping List educated readers about a vast assortment of luxury consumer goods and services, while the Dog Mart encouraged readers to participate in the wildly popular fashion of dog ownership. Advertisements for fashion and cars, and for golf and rest cure vacations dripped with sugary appeals to wealthy readers. Vanity Fair

40 This satirical piece claims to be a reprint of letters from women to President Wilson. One example reads: ―Dear Mr. Wilson: I am a debutante. I want to prepare at once. ‗What for?‘ you ask. Well, I want to prepare for Newport and Bar Harbor. The Germans are sure to land there during the summer. What shall I wear? How shall I dress? Tell me all that you know about it. I shall detain you but a moment. –Eunice.‖

87 embodies the genre of the ―smart magazine,‖ a turn-of-the-century phenomenon defined by the posh advertising that supported and sold such magazines. George Douglas, in his definition of the genre, claims that while most smart magazines began with an appeal to social elites, most broadened their appeal over time to a more mainstream audience (5).41 Vanity Fair is an exception to this broadening of appeal, and its circulation never surpassed 100,000. Only six months after its initial beginning in September 1913 as Dress & Vanity Fair, the Conde Nast publication was taken up by editor Frank Crowninshield, who removed all references to women‘s fashions, and the name was shortened to Vanity Fair. Crowinshield‘s introductory editorial in the March 1914 issue clarified his goals for the magazine: ―first, to believe in the progress and promise of American life, and, second, to chronicle that progress cheerfully, truthfully, and entertainingly‖ (15). The magazine would be a place for satire, an ―angle…sometimes a little foreign to our American artists and authors.‖ In order to improve American artists, Crowinshield claimed, it will be one of Vanity Fair‘s most pleasant duties to wean them from their stiff, unyielding ways and make them, as the French periodicals have succeeded in making theirs, a little more free in their technique—a shade less academic and ―tight‖—a trifle more fluent, fantastic, or even absurd. To achieve the ambitious goal of altering the course of American modernism, the magazine changed the focus of its content, including a wider range of modern art and literature rather than just light-hearted essays and works. In place of the dress patterns women would originally have purchased the magazine for, and clearly distinguishing between domestic and intellectual pursuits, Crowinshied wrote, ―For women we intend to do something in a noble and missionary spirit, something which, so far as we can observe, has never been done before for them by an American magazine. We mean to make frequent appeals to their intellects.‖ He goes on to claim that the editors are ―determined and bigoted feminists.‖ There is little in Vanity Fair to uphold this claim. The magazine paid frequent attention to shopping, Parisian fashions, and the trouble women cause in relationships. Pieces like the aforementioned Greely-Smith article frequently upheld the tenets of True Womanhood even while the magazine sought to make fun of the

41 Douglas‘s critical observations are often flawed by an idealistic, reverent attitude toward his object of study: ―the magazine field was dominated by vigorous but shabby commercialism in those days, but the smart magazines almost magically lifted the sphere of magazine publishing to a hitherto unattained excellence‖ (5). However, his work is still one of the better sources of factual information about the history of these magazines in the 1910s and 1920s.

88 women‘s magazines who also perpetuated this ideology. The magazine claims to be feminist, to look for artists whose technique is ―fantastic‖ and ―absurd.‖ However, the representations of women writers and other women in the magazine do not fall in line with the editors‘ claims to be ―determined and bigoted feminists.‖ The cultural value of the claim, however, was high for a magazine trying to distinguish itself from the ―women‘s pages.‖42 Such concerns must have been at the forefront of editors‘ minds as they arranged the shortened June 1917 edition of Vanity Fair in which Stein first appeared. An inside-cover advertisement for the magazine reveals a publication conflicted about how to deal with regular content during a time made so serious by the American involvement in World War I. The advertisement makes no mention of the war. Instead, it asks, ―Do you work at being Married?‖ ―Before you married HIM,‖ it says, ―you WORKED at being lovable.‖ ―You tossed about at night thinking up things that would amuse him. You spent hours in planning a new frock, or a new dance, or a new mood, or a new bon mot to amuse him. You wore your mind to a shadow figuring how you could break him of singing tenor, and still retain his love.‖ Here, the magazine reminds women of their duty to their husbands, reinforcing gender norms shaped by patriarchal relationships. The way to maintain your duty to your husband is to subscribe to Vanity Fair, which will ―keep you from settling down in the marital ooze.‖ The ad lists the sections of the magazine—stage, opera, humor, sports, dancing, fashion, dogs and motors, shopping. However, the advertisement also asks, ―Is your marriage an armed neutrality? Are you too proud to fight?‖—a direct reference to America‘s reticence to involve itself in wartime activities. Stein‘s work joins this contradictory discourse when her poem ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled‖ is printed in Vanity Fair in June 1917. The cover of this issue of Vanity Fair represents the transformation of the magazine— and the country and artists it represented—from passive observers of the war to active participants.

42 Vanity Fair often directly used the ―women‘s pages‖ as an object of sarcasm in its pages. In the same volume in which Stein‘s ―Great American Army‖ appeared, Stephen Leacock‘s ―How to Live in War Time: Hints for Patriotic Women Based on Information from the Latest Ladies Magazines‖ satirizes women‘s efforts to save money during wartime.

Figure 4 October 1914: The "ragtag Figure 5 June 1917: "Vive l'Amerique!" Parisian Refugee"

The June 1917 cover, titled ―Vive l‘Amerique!‖ features a young woman with short hair, hunched slightly under the weight of a rifle with bayonet.43 The illustration is a replica of Rabojoi‘s untitled October 1914 Vanity Fair cover of ―a ragtag Parisian refugee in a tricolor skirt, complete with parasol and drooping red roses.‖44 In the 1917 image, the parasol has been replaced by a rifle, the flowers have disappeared, and the young woman‘s face is thinner, though her expression remains cautious and apprehensive. The 1917 illustration is captioned ―Drawn by RABAJOI in the trenches,‖ leaving readers to wonder whether the ―ragtag‖ refugee hasn‘t joined the front lines of the war herself. Is she hopeful that the American entry will bring her peace, as the French title ―Vive l‘Amerique!‖ suggests? The expression on the woman‘s face is not hopeful. When Rabajoi‘s 1914 cover hit American newsstands, Gertrude Stein was stranded in England, unable to return immediately to her home in Paris because of the outbreak of war. When his June 1917 cover made its debut, Stein was driving her beloved Ford as a supply truck for hospitals in France. From ―ragtag refugee‖ to ―armed‖ soldier-woman, the trajectory of

43 French artist Rabojoi was the illustrator. He had contributed cover art and several series of sketches to Vanity Fair in previous years. 44 Conde Nast sells reprints of most of Vanity Fair’s covers, in color, from 1910 to 1939. However, the June 1917 cover is not available for viewing or purchase.

Stein‘s life is represented by Rabajoi‘s Vanity Fair covers, even if it isn‘t represented well in the magazine‘s content. Stein‘s first publication in Vanity Fair in June 1917, ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled‖ is a portrait of Henry McBride. Stein and McBride were introduced in the summer of 1913 by their mutual friend Mildred Alrich. McBride was instantly enamored by Stein‘s work and believed it was an important contribution to modernism. He became her avid supporter in her early career, telling her ―there is a public for you but no publisher‖ after his unsuccessful attempt to get one of her plays produced in the United States (91). He mentioned Stein in his art column at The Sun and promoted Tender Buttons when it came out in 1914. Catherine Morris, editor of McBride‘s Selected Letters notes, ―Along with Carl Van Vechten, and later Jane Heap, McBride was one of the most consistent and efficacious figures trying to connect Stein with her public‖ (Watson 91). McBride, who was friends with Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowinshield, arranged for Stein‘s first commercial publication.45 Thirty or more lines were cut from the portrait, likely for space considerations. The editorial introduction to the poem takes up half of a column, and there were only three columns to the one-page layout. The poem is characteristic of Stein‘s style after Tender Buttons, when she departed from the long prose lines that marked her previous style. Around the time that she worked on the still- life pieces in Tender Buttons, Stein discovered that strategically using white space on the page achieves a striking visual effect. ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled‖ is divided (on one page) into sections chronologically labeled Page I through Page XXXIII. The magazine page is divided into three columns, the first of which largely consists of the editorial introduction. The first stanza (Page I) has the most lines of any stanza in the poem. It reads, Can you be more confusing by laughing. Do say yes. We are extra. We have the reasonableness of a woman and we say we do not like a room. We wish we were married. Why do you believe in me. Including all that is sold, you mean three

45 McBride did not stop at Vanity Fair with ―Did They Attack Mary. He Giggled.‖ Morris notes that he arranged with Horace Templeton to print two-hundred copies of the work in booklet form, using Jules Pascin‘s portrait of McBride on the cover and also distributed thirty copies through Sunwise Turn Bookstore in New York.

pictures, including all that is sold why cannot you give me that. I do give it to you. Thank you I was only joking. But I do mean it. Thank you very much. If Vanity Fair‘s readers were familiar with Stein‘s repetitive, circuitous prose style, they may have been surprised by the brevity of each stanza—most are only one to four lines, and many are short, end-stopped lines. If they had encountered the numerous parodies of Stein‘s Tender Buttons style, or if they were lucky enough to chance across one of the newspaper columns reprinting short excerpts of the book, they may have been pleasantly surprised by the grammatical coherence of this poem/portrait‘s lines. ―An Utterance from the High Priestess of Cubist Literature,‖ as Vanity Fair subtitled the poem, uses the discursive patterns of conversation to build a sensory familiarity. One can hear the pattern of conversation and see a visual representation of dialogue on the page. However, Stein chooses language that defamiliarizes these patterns. The one-line stanzas deny the familiarity of dialogue, although several of these stanzas are questions while the others are statements: ―Can a jew be wild.‖; ―Can you please me with kisses‖; ―Why am I so sleepy‖; ―It is wonderful the way I am not interested.‖; ―It is outrageous to mention a hotel.‖ The poem is also interested in presenting a variety of female roles. The female speaker of the poem swims in lakes and owns an automobile. There is mention of a queen, an Englishwoman, and ―a laundry-woman.‖ The speaker continues, ―You did not understand the laundry-woman. Yes woman porters. Why should we be proud. Because it is foolish.‖ The only role that doesn‘t fit for a woman is the domestic one. Travel, exercise, sexuality, and power are all transformative representations of women in this poem. Each of these lines implies a second person, perhaps Henry McBride, art critics in general, Alice B. Toklas, or the reader. Reading the second person as Alice B. Toklas provides additional meaning to the poem, as it represents an intimate love between the two women. In many ways, the significance of ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled‖ lies in the way that the Vanity Fair introduction to the poem directs readers‘ understanding of Stein as a writer and a woman. This introduction provides important contextual understanding for the ways that Stein‘s work was presented and understood by editors at Vanity Fair, and can help us

92 analyze her later, more experimental and transformative work in the magazine. The introduction reveals that the editors of the magazine were not entirely secure in their decision to publish this strange new artist. Despite some earlier publications of high modernists in the magazine, editors were still uncertain enough about Stein‘s reception to include a lengthy introduction to her piece. It begins: Miss Gertrude Stein, the Cubist writer…has given up her literary labors of late, in order to drive an ambulance in France, of which country she has long been an enthusiastic and loyal resident. Somehow, it seems if the surest test for the detection of a modern philistine is the poetic work of Gertrude Stein….the individual, male or female, who begins foaming at the mouth at Miss Stein‘s second ―page‖…and ends by writing a letter of protest to the Editor of Vanity Fair, IS one. Decidedly this second individual is one. Is one decidedly. The introduction hints at the level and types of risk editors felt themselves to be taking with the publication of Stein‘s work. It links Stein to patriotic war work, cutting-edge modernist artists, and Cubism and anticipates potential negative reactions to the piece by calling anyone who doesn‘t enjoy and appreciate Stein‘s words a ―philistine.‖ Finally, in an effort to introduce and explain Stein‘s circuitous, non-referential style, this name-calling mimics Stein‘s style: ―IS one. Decidedly this second individual is one. Is one decidedly.‖ The introduction serves as a reading guide for the poem to follow, and in mimicking her style emphasizes readability in her aesthetic. In giving permission for such a strategy, Stein negotiates the print market in a conscious effort to present new representations of female authorship and identities with middlebrow readers in a popular forum. The editors of Vanity Fair were picking up on a popular trend when they mimicked Stein‘s style, a trend begun in the New York press by Don Marquis‘s 1914 New York Sun column. In fact, recent scholarship investigating Stein‘s reception by the American public has uncovered an ongoing imitation of Stein‘s style in the popular media, complicating current understandings of the relationship between modernism and mass culture and indicating that the American public was more aware of Stein‘s difficult style than previously thought. However, the result is that the public may have had greater access to the parodies of her work than to her actual writing. While Gertrude Stein had been writing nearly full time since beginning Q.E.D in 1902, she only managed to publish three short pieces before her 1917 Vanity Fair publication—

―Matisse‖ and ―Picasso‖ in 1912 and the longer, more complex ―Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Caronia‖ in 1913, all in Alfred Stieglitz‘s Camera Work. Stein‘s portraits of Picasso and Matisse were the first English texts on these painters, an early representation of the literal avant- garde nature of Stein‘s early work (Stendhal 58). This is a large part of the perceived risk editors of Vanity Fair felt when supporting her work. Her writing, especially her poetry, was so dramatically different in style and content that new readers were baffled at how to approach the work. In part, this is how Stein managed to present risky, transformative representations of female identity in the pages of a magazine devoted only to securing profit from high-end advertisers and encouraging cheerfulness and satire. The risk, however, must have paid off, because at least six of her pieces appeared in Vanity Fair from 1917 to 1921, a period in which few of her works were published anywhere else. As discussed above, Vanity Fair carefully packaged Stein‘s piece in a way that both helped readers approach her words with understanding and also left little room for readers to complain if they couldn‘t understand her work. Since the United States had entered the war a few months prior to this publication, the American government had put together the most massive public advertising campaign the world had ever seen. Over a quarter of a million propaganda posters illustrated by popular magazine artists of the day were in circulation by war‘s end in 1918. These posters popularized the idea of supporting the Allies as necessary and noble, reifying preexisting stereotypes of masculinity and femininity that encouraged women to do their part on the homefront and to support the brave young men who were overseas fighting an evil and ruthless enemy. Although early in this nationwide campaign to convert a pacifist, isolationist populace into a country dedicated to the cause of war, the effort would have been noticeable by June 1917. Therefore, connecting Gertrude Stein to her war work in France was a strategic move by Vanity Fair‘s editors to position Stein as an American patriot, and to capitalize on the jingoistic rhetoric sweeping through print culture at the time. After announcing, ―the reader who takes a delirious joy in the poem which we publish here, who constantly stops his reading to say ‗Isn‘t it great?‘ ‗Isn‘t it wonderful,‘ etc., is not a philistine,‖ Vanity Fair moves on again to the celebrity gossip angle: ―Miss Stein, who is immensely famous in France, is a Jewess, once of San Francisco, but now of Paris.‖ The back-and-forth between critically judging its readers and providing them with gossipy news aligns well with the magazines dual goals: ―to chronicle…progress cheerfully, truthfully, and entertainingly,‖ and to help make art ―a shade less

94 academic and ‗tight.‘‖ At the same time, the introduction contradicts much of the content of the magazine, in which women were encouraged to stay at home to support their families during the war. Vanity Fair‘s introduction also aligns with the reputation that had developed around Gertrude Stein after the limited release of Tender Buttons in 1914. As Carl Van Vechten informed Stein in a 1916 letter, ―Your name pops up in current journalism with great frequency. You are as famous in America as any historical character—and if you came over I think you might have as great a reception as say Jenny Lind‖ (Van Vechten to Stein, late March 1916, 50). Linking Stein to Lind, a Swedish soprano who successfully toured the United States under P.T. Barnum, Van Vechten emphasizes the celebrity-status of Stein‘s name in the American press. At the same time, the connection to a celebrity managed by Barnum highlights the ways that the literary market exploited Stein in order to spark interest in its own endeavors. Sensationalizing Stein‘s name, like Barnum sensationalized Lind‘s voice, hides the real effect and meaning of her work in favor of the spectacle of her personality. In the same vein, Vanity Fair labeled Stein the ―High Priestess‖ in order to highlight the spectacle of her literary position and reputation as a famous female author. And as Stein observed, critics and journalists had been quoting her extensively since 1914, even if they claimed that what she was doing was incomprehensible nonsense. Having already called the difficult ―The Portrait of Mabel Dodge‖ a masterpiece, the introduction continues by presenting Stein as an expert on modern art: ―She was one of the earliest patrons of Matisse, and for some years past her salon has been the stamping ground for the exponents of all the newer art forms.‖ The text then highlights Stein‘s connection to Picasso, another push toward gossip and celebrity news, and also using the male artist‘s name as validation for their decision to accept Stein‘s work. The introduction claims that ―the great man himself is frequently to be encountered at her celebrated receptions.‖ Readers picked up on the Gertrude Stein name and wanted to know more about this middle-aged American woman living in France with her companion-secretary. Having been taught by the introduction to read Gertrude Stein as a Cubist who is using repetition and nonreferential pronouns (―Is one. Is one decidedly‖) to convey a portrait of Henry McBride, readers may have been able to accept ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled‖ as a good example of the experimental artwork coming out of Europe at the time. Not wanting to be ―philistines,‖ readers read the piece carefully attempting to understand Stein‘s

―method.‖ If they read carefully, they also managed to understand Stein‘s alternative representations of womanhood. Of course, they may have just let their eyes drift to the next page in search of the satirical humor Vanity Fair was known for and the war-themed material they were being taught to expect. Commenting on the ―pamphlet‖ version of the work (titled ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled—A Political Satire) for a Vanity Fair article in 1923, Edmund Wilson claims this piece is an extension of the portrait form she published in Camera Work and in the short-lived little magazine Rogue, but applied to ―more complicated subjects.‖46 Wilson writes that these subjects are ―all splintered up and reduced to their essentials, a queer selective stenography of life.‖47 The link between Gertrude Stein‘s portraits and Cubism, the same concept that was used by Vanity Fair in 1917 and by the Little Review in 1922 is continued in Wilson‘s article, subtitled ―The Evolution of a Master of Fiction into a Painter of Cubist Still-Life in Prose.‖ Wilson quotes from Three Lives and Tender Buttons to claim that Stein‘s change in style has resulted in a forfeit of the talent and intellectual thought developed in Three Lives. Wilson blames this change on her association with ―the plastic arts‖ and with artists themselves—―I am told by her friends that for many years she has seen almost no literary people but only sculptors and painters; and it is a fact that there has is scarcely a trace of literary reference to be found in any of her works.‖ Despite this negative view of Stein‘s work, Wilson did offer to get another of Stein‘s pieces, ―A List,‖ published in Vanity Fair later in 1923. He let her know (through Carl Van Vechten) that the piece would need to be cut in order to fit Vanity Fair‘s editorial style and length restrictions. However, she politely refused to have the piece cut for publication, reasoning, ―the quality of it is in the way it fills itself out and so I must say no‖ (Burns 81 n3). This refusal may have contributed to Vanity Fair’s decision not to publish more of Stein‘s work. Van Vechten indicated a different reason in a letter to Stein in early 1924: ―as for your wonderful

46 ―A Guide to Gertrude Stein: The Evolution of a Master of Fiction into a Painter of Cubist Still-Life in Prose.‖ Vanity Fair, September 1923, 60, 80. It is interesting that Wilson would not have commented on Vanity Fair’s July 1917 publication of ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.‖ 47 In the Vanity Fair article, Wilson writes, ―We figure her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Mr. Jo Davidson‘s statue, ruminating eternally on the ebb and flood of life, registering impressions like some august seismograph. And we cannot but regret that the results of her meditations are communicated to us in oracles.‖ In 1931, Wilson revises this comment (but not the essential meaning of the text) and includes it in Axel’s Castle: ―Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature - and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read.‖

96 portrait of me [‗One. Carl Van Vechten‖]—Crowninshield who has had it ever since you gave it to me at last decided that Vanity Fair had been publishing a good deal of your work & so he would lay off awhile—a stupid decision‖ (March 5 1924, 93). McBride would have disagreed with Wilson‘s assessment, however. One of the first critics to link Stein‘s words to new movements in painting was Mabel Dodge. Her ―Postimpressionism in Prose,‖ originally published in the Armory Show issue of Arts and Decoration (February 1913), was reprinted in Camera Work in June 1913. The reprint popularized her description that ―in a large studio in Paris, hung with paintings by Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso, Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint.‖ This statement effectively linked Stein to Cubism immediately after the 1913 Armory Show introduced Americans to the modernist artwork (including Picasso, Duchamp, and Matisse) that had been circulating in Europe since the 1905 Fauvist exhibition (where Stein and her brother Leo began to collect modern art). McBride didn‘t disagree with the connection Dodge made; however, he would have disagreed with the way Wilson judged the connection a decade later. McBride was sure that Stein‘s effort to translate the theoretical foundations of Cubist art into word portraits was a useful and (most importantly) possible labor—a notion not shared with Wilson. A joke in a letter to Stein reinforces the notion that he thought Dodge‘s connection at the Armory Show was a useful guide for interpreting Stein‘s work: ―By the way I read Mrs. Dodge‘s review of your work in the Photo-Secession Book. It is fine—but I almost regret she did it. I am a rank snob in art, and I hated to see her help the mob so much. I don‘t like fine things going into large editions. Too many people will now understand it, or at least know how to take it, (which is the main thing)‖ (―To Gertrude Stein,‖ Dec 12 1913, The Sun, New York, 95). If McBride was afraid Dodge‘s observations on Stein would lead the ―mob‖ to clamor for more of Stein‘s writing, he was mistaken. And, despite a hopeful title that promised to be helpful to readers—―A Guide to Gertrude Stein‖—Wilson‘s 1923 dismissal of Stein‘s word portraits is proof positive that even a defender of some of Stein‘s works would be left unwilling or unable to accept the ways she chose to transform the vision of female authorship and representations of womanhood. If Vanity Fair‘s heavy-handed ―celebrity‖ introduction to ―Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled‖ didn‘t convince readers that Gertrude Stein was patriotic, ―The Great American Army,‖ published the following June (1918) certainly would. Listed in the Table of Contents under the newly-created section ―Of American and Allied Interest,‖ Stein‘s choice of subject helped her

97 land a more coveted placement early in the magazine. Vanity Fair did not use a heavy-handed prose introduction for this poem. Instead, her poem appears on the bottom third of the page, the better part of the page taken up by a large reprint of a lithograph by Lucien Jonas titled ―Courage, mes braves! J‘arrive!‖ The illustration does the work of explanation and introduction, and sets the tone of the page as somber, apprehensive, frightening, and yet tinged with hope. Two weary French soldiers (one young and scared, the other older and steady) are crouched near a tattered barbwire fence, hesitant. An American soldier, arms outspread, is behind them, his gun raised, a defiant but determined expression on his young face. He appears to be both urging on and protecting the French soldiers. The Statue of Liberty is in the background, blended into the clouds, her arm outstretched like the American soldier‘s. Stein‘s poem, which accompanies the wartime illustration is brief, 27 short lines. The rather lucid poem compares the American army to an acorn, implying that greatness will emerge from the Army the way greatness emerges from the green center of an acorn. She references war work (―I write to loan/ We do work so well. / And what must we do?‖) and munitions (―What do you call them? / Plates. / And where do you use them? / In guns. / The French pronounce it Guns. / So do the English‖) before declaring ―We have hope; / Certainly— / And Success!‖ While the poem does use the dialogic form and, to a lesser extent, the repetition, found in her earlier publication, it is clear that this poem is not written in Stein‘s typical style. This is likely the reason Vanity Fair accepted another poem from Stein so quickly. Publishing ―The Great American Army‖ allowed Vanity Fair to satisfy readers with war-related content and with a cutting-edge modernist celebrity. While this poem has no introduction, there is a brief comment presented ―caption-style‖ to the right of the poem. After again declaring Stein a ―so-called cubist in prose‖ and mentioning her ambulance driving in France, the comment continues, ―Few American women have taken a more active part in the conflict than she. During the past few weeks, the continued arrival of our troops in France has inspired her to compose this poem.‖ Taking up an issue very popular in magazines in 1918, Vanity Fair highlights Stein‘s gender and connects it to the discourse of war work. They also position Stein as a kind of front-lines reporter, writing poems ―inspired‖ by the very latest events in the field. Although the fighting had ceased, one of four new poems by Stein published in Vanity Fair in March 1919 still addressed the war. Placed toward the back of the magazine (page 88) and not even listed in the Table of Contents, ―A Deserter‖ is a simple dialogue-style poem about

98 a man who was a deserter, had two brothers die in the war, and then was arrested. The most interesting part of the poem is what follows the ten short lines of the poem: I cannot forget Narcissus Deschamps. He was a deserter. He had had them brothers killed in the war. He was a professor and took pleasure in a bout of box. He told us he was an automobile assayer. He worked very well and he got the colic and the police caught him. We know him.

The combination of prose and poetry is unusual for Stein, but the dialect that jumps out in the third sentence—―He had had them brothers killed in the war‖—changes the entire tone of the poem, which begins with the sing-song line: ―Simple Narcissus flung in a flower.‖ The prose reads almost like an ―explanation‖ of the poem, except for the ―them,‖ which puts the prose into another‘s voice. The three other poems published simultaneously with this one (―The Meaning of the Bird,‖ ―J.R.,‖ and ―J.R., II.‖) are more cryptic and quite short. Vanity Fair began the series with ―A Deserter‖ to bring readers into Stein‘s style with a simpler example. Again including an introduction to Stein‘s work, the editors frame Stein‘s work not as celebrity-news, but as a high- stakes art debate. Stein, the introduction explains, ―has stirred the critics and people of taste all over the world to the verge of ecstasy—or insensate fury.‖ What has caused the ectasy and fury, readers wonder. Is it the charged representations of female authorship? Is it the possibilities posed by her nonreferential style? The introduction continues by mentioning Stein‘s gender and connecting it to her wartime service: ―She is an able woman, very able. Lately she has been doing yeoman service for the American army in France, having driven an ambulance for over two years, and having driven it extremely well.‖ Where their information about her driving comes from is unclear, as Stein never really learned how to driver her car in reverse, although it is interesting that the editors felt this note would appeal to readers. As Conrad notes, the introduction also uses the same rhetoric of salesmanship as the half-page Pepsodent advertisement (―That Film Must Go‖) that appeared opposite Stein‘s four poems: ―‗Teeth cleaning methods must be changed,‘ the advertisement avers, just as Vanity Fair‘s headnote to Stein‘s poems proclaims that literary methods must be and have changed: ‗Whether or not you like her art form—or lack of it, rather, whether or not you understand the cryptic meaning of her verses, there she is, and there is her influence, and there are her changes, and there they will remain.‖ Vanity Fair definitely used Stein as a type of commodity—one that could function as celebrity, patriot, modernist, and controversy and might also increase the sales of subscriptions.

By showing herself a capable front-lines reporter and interpreter of wartime events, Stein resists the male-dominated versions of war narratives, the versions still privileged in literary criticism today. Both her poem and the introduction reveal a female writer independently interpreting, experiencing, and participating in World War I. This rejects representations of women as either flighty/unserious, spectacle/object or as domestic/serious—the representations most common in the pages of Vanity Fair. Gertrude Stein‘s most accessible publication in Vanity Fair (and her longest) was also her last, perhaps because Stein refused editorial changes to a subsequent possible publication, or possibly because Stein befriended Jane Heap in 1923 and had found a more receptive venue for her work at the Little Review. More likely, in 1923 Gertrude Stein was no longer the debutante that Vanity Fair took such delight in introducing. She was an established writer, one whose demands about her publications were getting stricter as her confidence grew. Like the tired stage actress or the aging soprano, Gertrude Stein was set aside by Frank Crowninshield‘s magazine in favor of newer debutantes. Her final appearance, ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene: The Tale of Two Young Ladies Who Were Gay Together and of How One Left the Other Behind,‖ was printed in July 1923, tucked between a satiric series of illustrations (―The Seven Suitors of an Heiress‖) and the reproduction of a sculpture. This piece is a portrait of two of Stein‘s acquaintances, lesbian couple Mabel Squires and Ethel Mars (Blackmer, n34). This piece is the riskiest piece Stein published in Vanity Fair, but editors seem not to have taken note. Instead, the introduction to the piece notes only its readability and style: This amusing short story, in one of Miss Gertrude Stein‘s simpler manners, should convince those readers who have hitherto been baffled by her later and more telegraphic style that she is really a writer of remarkable abilities. It will be seen that the style, though queer, is exactly suited to the subject, which if it were not developed monotonously could scarcely be developed at all. What ―subject‖ editors felt needed be developed ―monotonously‖ is unclear here. Are they suggesting that they recognize the piece as the story of a lesbian relationship, which requires this style as a way to make the piece less controversial—a subject that in most venues ―could scarcely be developed at all?‖ More likely, editors were simply looking for a way to describe her style.

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The prose portrait uses familiar Stein techniques—repetition, limited vocabulary and narrow grammatical sequences—to tell a love story. In the story, Helen Furr, one of the two main characters, leaves her ―pleasant‖ parents and ―pleasant home‖ to go some place where ―some were cultivating something, voices and other things needing cultivating,‖ where she met the other main character, Georgine Skeene. ―Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene lived together then.‖ The two ―were gay there, not very gay there, just gay there‖ and worked to ―cultivate their voices.‖ For years, they enjoy each other‘s company, visit family regularly, travel on occasion, and continue ―being gay‖: Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene were regularly living where very many were living and cultivating in themselves something…They did then learn many ways to be gay and they were then being gay being quite regular in being gay, being gay and they were learning little things, little things in ways of being gay, they were very regular then and they were gay the same amount they had been gay. Laura Behling notes that while the word ―gay‖ did not necessarily denote ―homosexual‖ in 1911, this portrait is definitely a picture of a lesbian couple (―For the Record‖). In fact, Corrine Blackmer calls the Vanity Fair publication of ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene‖ an ―important and, at least for queer readers, surprising exception to Stein‘s marginalization in the literary marketplace‖ (Behling 252 n34). Conrad argues that Vanity Fair marketed the piece no differently than any other commodity in its pages, and Behling agrees. In the sketch, the couple leads a very regular life, cultivating their ―voices,‖ learning new ways of living and being, spending some time with friends—―some dark and heavy men there then.‖ Georgine leaves to visit her brother, but Helen decides not to go visit her family. Georgine, however, never returns from her visit. ―Helen Furr stayed there where they had been regularly living the two of them and she would then certainly not be lonesome, she would go on being gay.‖ Indeed, and she was ―not astonished at not feeling any need of having Georgine Skeene.‖ Helen finds new ways of being gay, although she did not ―use‖ her voice as often. The portrait ends, She was living very well, she was gay then, she went on living then, she was regular in being gay, she always was living very well and was gay very well and was telling about little ways one could be learning to use in being gay, and later was telling them quite often, telling them again and again.

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Having regained her voice, Helen learns to live a life of happiness without her former lover. She even becomes a teacher, telling other women her story and her ideas about how to live a meaningful and open life. A story of female love, interdependence, and self-reliance, this portrait‘s recognizable ―plot‖ makes it one of Stein‘s more accessible pieces. ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene‖ reinforces Vanity Fair‘s mission of ―entertaining‖ the world ―cheerfully.‖ Despite the separation of the lovers midway through the portrait, the piece remains faithfully upbeat and ―gay.‖ This representation of female identity, behavior, and independence contrasts the images throughout Vanity Fair‘s pages. In resisting the available modes of representation, Stein uses the market, negotiating a space for her ideas among the satire, advertisements, and fashion editorials that may have drawn readers into the pages of the magazine. However, in a self-advertising sketch three months later, Vanity Fair parodies Stein‘s ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.‖ The parody picks up where Stein‘s piece left off, and has Helen Furr marry Harold Moss, who quickly tires of Helen and wants her to be ―less gay.‖ He tells her so and hits her over the head with his walking stick. ―And, now that I have regularly brained you,‖ he tells her, ―I already feel a little more gay.‖ Behling points out that this parody of Stein suggests that Stein‘s version of modernism—including her relationship with Alice B. Toklas— may have been more than the American public could appreciate. Stein was not unaware of public taste and reaction, nor was she dedicated to presenting only gay and lesbian relationships. After all, Stein rewrote the lesbian love triangle of Q.E.D as a heterosexual relationship in Melanctha and still interspersed details of a lesbian relationship in the story. Despite Vanity Fair’s publication of the daring ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,‖ the editorial staff was unwilling to give Stein the last word on modernism, on sexuality, or on the techniques Vanity Fair would use to advertise her. Stein‘s authorial control was never complete while she published in Vanity Fair, but she had even less control over a parody of her work. In the end, Vanity Fair‘s parody may have positioned Stein as caricature. Behling even goes so far as to argue, ―Vanity Fair‘s marketing of Stein and Modernism also contained an implicit alternative product that the magazine was selling,‖ namely heterosexuality. However, Stein‘s actual work was powerful enough in the venue to overcome the caricature of her and her work in the magazine‘s advertising pages. Using Vanity Fair as a medium through which she could work on her authorial identity under the pressures of publication, Stein aligned herself against idealizations of womanhood as

102 wide ranging as mother, war-wife, flapper, and spectacle (stars of the stage). She did this by complicating those images through her textual personas—war reporter, lesbian companion, teacher, ―high priestess‖ of modernism. Performing some identities in order to subvert others, Stein offers a significant rewriting of American womanhood. This enabled gender and sexual experimentation alongside avant-garde cultural productions, defying convention in her art and her life.

Making No Compromise: Gertrude Stein in the Little Review

Stein‘s work appeared with some regularity in The Sun, Life, and Vanity Fair during WWI, but after the war, her publication in higher circulation periodicals began to wane. Perhaps without the commercially-viable link to American patriotism that her war work in France provided, her poetry and sketches looked less profitable to American markets, and the volume of imitations of Stein in the popular newspaper press may have made her work seem tired. The internationally-focused little magazine Broom, based in Rome in its first years, serialized Stein‘s ―If You Had Three Husbands‖ over the course of three consecutive issues in 1922, but no American magazines took interest in Stein at this time with the exception of the Little Review. While the Little Review’s offices were in Paris during the years Gertrude Stein was published, and while it published many European artists, it was a distinctly American magazine. As William Carlos Williams wrote, ―I hope I may be permitted to say that the Little Review is American, that it, yes, alone, is worth while because it maintains contact with common sense in America. It is the only important reaction to the American environment, the only reaction that is not a coat of paint on the stanchion‖ (Autumn 1922 Little Review 60). Stein‘s publications in the Little Review reveal an author at times playful and at times serious, always re-imagining American identity through repetition, defamiliarization, and circular prose. Founded by Margaret Anderson in 1914 (joined in 1916 by co-editor Jane Heap), the Little Review wasn‘t like many other little magazines promoting modernism, in part because of its long life, and in part because of Anderson‘s need to turn a profit. Anderson frequently made appeals for money in the pages of her magazine, and even imitated the larger-circulation magazine‘s calls for young people to sell magazine subscriptions for extra money.48 Bishop

48 In December 1918, for example: ―An Offer: If there are people in the world who wish to make money in an easy and congenial way, why not try selling magazine subscriptions to the Little Review? For every subscription you get

103 claims that little magazines are ―by definition magazines that do not make money; they are trying to promote new ideas or forms of art, rather than sales.‖ His definition continues, ―the little magazine is always in an adversarial position with regard to the dominant culture, and when it loses that adversarial edge, or the enthusiasm of its backers, it dies‖ (Bishop 287). However, the editors of Little Review were not opposed to making money. Sales were vitally important to the success and survival of the magazine. Anderson was dedicated to ―new ideas‖ as much as any other publisher of modernism, and she was firmly committed to ―Art for Art‘s sake.‖ She described her ambitions in The Little Review Anthology in 1953: My conviction in founding the Little Review was that people who make Art are more interesting than those who don‘t; that they have a special illumination about life; that this illumination is the subject-matter of all inspired conversation; that one might as well be dead as to live outside this radiance. I was sure that I could impose my conviction by creating a magazine dedicated to Art for Art‘s sake. (11) Anderson always attributed her success with the magazine largely to her ability to tell what was ―interesting‖ writing. Benstock notes that many attempted to glean a more specific editorial policy from her in interviews, but it always came back to personal distinctions and a dislike for ―intellectual‖ poetry (369). The writing that filled the pages of the magazine after 1922, when she left the magazine—including Gertrude Stein‘s work—she considered ―the dead end of intellectual obscurantism‖ (12). Anderson never shied away from critical and intellectual debate in the pages of her magazine. The trope of ―conversation‖ indicated that Anderson and Heap were open to other voices.49 As Marek has noted, ―they drew from a wide range of literary and

of $2.50 we will give you an unusually liberal commission. If you will call at our office, or write us, we will supply full information, lists of names, etc. This is a real opportunity for mutual help.‖ The advertisement is signed ―Margaret Anderson.‖ (1). On the second page of this same issue, adjacent to a piece by Djuna Barnes, is a call for subscribers to renew their subscriptions: ―we have survived the war. It is a long tale and a sad tale, but—won‘t you renew your subscriptions promptly? And won‘t you tell your friends that we are publishing the current works of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, and other important men in a cheap and convenient format? They can get these writers in no other American magazine, except spasmodically, and some of them not at all.‖ At the bottom of this call for subscription renewals is another brief note: ―If you can give $100, please realize that it will mean more to us than you can know.‖ 49 However, despite her dedication to publishing inspiring ―conversation‖ about the newest avant-garde work, Anderson was not opposed to ―sales.‖ ((The Little Review]'s ambitious aim is to produce -- music, art, drama and life that shall be fresh and constructive, and intelligent from the artist's point of view.‖49 Beginning her very early career reviewing books for the Interior, a popular Christian magazine in Chicago, working at a bookstore, writing for the Saturday Evening Post, and doing some work for the Dial, she had a firm grounding in the business of magazines when she decided to start The Little Review. Morrison, Bishop, and Benstock have analyzed the ways The Little Review intersected with commercial and popular culture in its advertising strategies, its ideological positioning, and in its format (layout, design, columns).

104 critical voices while maintaining subtle control over the types and directions of critical exchanges; they deliberately and effectively resisted traditional ‗voices of authority‘ by presenting multiple perspectives—in short, the Little Review reflects and enacts many of the characteristics fundamental to modernism‖ (Marek 100). Anderson and Heap enacted this exchange of voices in part by including a Reader Critic column in their magazine. In this space, much like in high-circulation magazines like Ladies’ Home Companion, the editors printed and responded to reader‘s letters. The conversations reflected the interests and intellects of these two trailblazing female editors, each of whom played a significant role in shaping American modernism. Bishop believes that the Little Review ―was neither respectable nor aggressively avant- garde‖ (300). Bishop refers to the juxtaposition of commercial advertising and experimental artistic content as ―bizarre,‖ but also notes that ―to publish in the Little Review had little economic value‖ (307). Admittedly, The Little Review struggled financially for most of the years it was published, especially after Anderson‘s original financial backer withdrew his support after she printed Emma Goldman‘s controversial ―Letters from Prison‖ in 1916 (Mott Volume 4 169). Anderson, strongly committed to feminism and to the cultural acceptance of lesbian sexuality, often found her ideas opposed to the mainstream. Anderson was certainly ―trying to promote new ideas or forms of art.‖ The magazine‘s subscription list was never steady, but it managed to climb higher than many of its contemporaries, some scholars estimating the circulations number as high as three-thousand.50 Margaret Anderson undoubtedly saw herself as a champion of the avant-garde and a promoter of ―beauty.‖ However, she did not necessarily understand these roles as separate from her job of selling magazines. Like Stein, she wanted an audience. Unlike Stein, she needed that audience to sustain her financially as well. Taking her cue from recent changes in the magazine publishing industry, Anderson pursued advertising as a way to finance her magazine and she elicited $450 from book publishers willing to advertise in the first issue of the Little Review. Mott attributes Anderson‘s success with her ―charming personality and enthusiasm.‖ However, this conclusion ignores the ways that her experience with two other magazines surely gave her insight into the business that helped her convince publishers of the potential success of her

50 Luther Mott believes this number to be inaccurate and the actual number closer to 1,000, however. See his History of American Magazines, Vol 4, p 171, note 17.

105 venture (Mott Volume 4 167-168). In fact, ―Anderson learned monotype and linotype, proofreading and makeup, by spying on the Dial staff‖ (Anderson 99). Seventeen of the sixty- seven pages of the first issue, then, were committed to advertising. Although Stein‘s writing would not appear for many more years in the journal, the first issue did not exclude her entirely. The issue included an article by George Soule, the editor of the New Republic, about Gertrude Stein‘s cubist writings, along with a contribution from longtime Stein supporter Sherwood Anderson.51 In addition to book advertising, The Little Review eventually secured nonliterary advertising, including the large companies Goodyear Tires and Mason & Hamlin Pianos (Morrison 136). Morrison notes that such inclusion ―suggests that American companies saw little ‗highbrow‘-‗lowbrow‘ distinction between this little magazine of modernist literature and art and more obviously mass market publications‖ (136). Anderson‘s pursuit of commercial advertising dollars shows that Anderson herself did not heed this distinction when it came to funding her venture.52 Some advertisers, however, were unwilling to connect their product‘s symbolic image to the sometimes controversial content of the magazine, and Anderson‘s success with advertising declined, especially after the Society for the Suppression of Vice won a verdict against Anderson and her co-editor Jane Heap for printing ―obscene‖ material (Joyce‘s Ulysses) in 1920. At this time in their history, the Little Review looked less attractive to potential advertisers at the same time that it looked more attractive to new artists. Margaret Anderson did not see Gertrude Stein‘s work as the kind of interesting ―conversation‖ she strove to include in her magazine. In the Little Review Anthology, Anderson explained her dislike for Gertrude Stein‘s work: ―I have never had any art enthusiasm for Gertrude Stein (except for her ‗Alice B. Toklas‘ and her story of the Second World War).‖ On

51 In his review, Soule claims to have finally come to understand some of Stein‘s work, but concludes, ―it seems her early work is now getting too obvious, so she is in the throes of a later phase. In her ‗Portrait of Miss Dodge‘ she has eliminated verbs and sentence structure entirely, flinging a succession of image-nouns at the reader. Once can surely not accuse her of ‗prettiness.‘‖ 52 Anderson‘s attempt to change her fortunes through advertising is well-known. In a sales pitch aimed at renewing advertising revenue, the June-July 1915 issue included seven nearly-blank pages, with an offer of five dollars to anyone who could bring in a full-page advertisement. Anderson framed the pages rhetorically as a space for what ―might have been,‖ drawing on the trope of unfulfilled desire so heavily used in modern consumer advertising—―On the following pages you will find the ‗ads‘ we might have had in this issue, but haven‘t‖ (56). Ten other pages of the magazine were also blank, these representing the lackluster submissions they had received but refused to print. Using the same scheme to represent a lack of quality advertising and of quality writing shows that Anderson felt the two were equally important to the goals of the magazine. Good writing was the backbone, and without advertising revenues, it was impossible to print and distribute that important literature.

106 why, then, she includes Stein‘s ―B.B. or the Birthplace of Bonnes‖ in the retrospective anthology, Anderson explains, ―I therefore include the following as typical of why her work didn‘t interest me. We also printed an article about her by Sherwood Anderson, one of her enthusiastic interpreters. If she had only achieved what her interpreters credit her with, I would have been interested in her own writing‖ (317). Anderson‘s co-editor Jane Heap, however, was quite enthusiastic about Stein‘s work. Therefore, after Anderson and Heap‘s relationship as lovers ended and after Anderson left the Little Review for other pursuits in 1923, Jane Heap officially took over editorship of the magazine and quickly solicited Stein for more manuscripts.53 Stein published a few pieces in the magazine before meeting Heap, but Heap requested specific materials from Stein after their meeting, which occurred at the rue de Fleurus after Heap sent Stein a letter in May, 1923: ―The Little Review will be in Paris for a short time— are you disposed to see enthusiastic admirers?‖ (Mellow 284). Mellow writes that when Heap arrived (without Anderson), ―the round of talk that she, Gertrude, and Alice began that afternoon, lengthened into the evening, through dinner, past midnight, and well into the dawn….Gertrude, following that first encounter, had liked Jane Heap ‗immensely.‘ Margaret Anderson, whom she met later, ‗interested her much less‘‖ (286-287). Although Stein didn‘t appreciate the Little Review‘s deep-rooted ties to James Joyce, with whom she felt a rivalry and whose work she felt certain was overrated, or to Ezra Pound, who she found disagreeable, Stein and Heap became friends, and Heap even made serious attempts to get the full manuscript of The Making of Americans published in the United States.54 Although Heap was not successful at securing an American publisher for The Making of Americans, partly due to interference by Robert McAlmon of Contact Editions, she did ensure that the readers of the Little Review had access to Gertrude Stein‘s work. Stein‘s first publication for the little magazine, ―Vacation in Britany‖ appeared in Spring 1922. The title of Stein‘s poem is misprinted as ―Vacation in Brittany‖ on the table of contents.55 The Little Review was

53 Although Heap cites 1923 as the date she officially took over editorship, Marek (Women Editing Modernism) has shown that changes in the Little Review’s emphasis and content toward European movements shows that she was likely responsible for a larger editorial role years before Anderson‘s departure in 1922. 54 For a full account of Heap‘s efforts on behalf of Stein‘s The Making of Americans, see Chapter 4 of Women Editing Modernism--―Reader Critics: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review,‖ pages 95-100. Malek‘s account differs from many accounts that claim Heap was just ―meddling‖ and getting in the way of Robert McAlmon‘s efforts to publish Stein in Contact Editions. 55 Carolyn Faunce Copeland points out that the ―correct‖ spelling, or the spelling Stein intended, is not entirely clear. ―Britany‖ could have been Stein‘s way to emphasize the ―brightness‖ of the seashore in Brittany, or ―Britany‖ may have been the misspelling by the Little Review.

107 infamous for its typographical errors, but such errors are not surprising or uncommon in relation to Stein‘s work, as her work often doesn‘t follow conventional standards of grammatical cohesion.56 By 1922, the magazine had been forced to change from a monthly to a quarterly publication due to lack of funds. The growing publicity surrounding Stein in American newspapers would not have been unwelcome by The Little Review. While Stein only reluctantly sent her material to magazines that didn‘t remunerate authors, her work appeared in The Little Review six times before the magazine finally folded in 1929. Her reception in this venue would be expected to be very different from her higher circulation publications. The audience for The Little Review looked much different from Vanity Fair‘s audience. Consisting of artists, painters, and literary patrons, these readers were accustomed to reading experimental works by T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. The editors of The Little Review, therefore, were careful not to introduce Stein‘s work. Readers expected no such introduction and might have been offended by the idea that they needed background information, an explanation of her aesthetics, or even information about the author. Instead, like many other contributors to the magazine, Stein‘s name does not even appear until the end of her piece. The editors include no introduction to the work, no picture of the artist, and no context for the piece. However, Heap positioned Stein‘s work in a way that would contextualize it for her readers. Stein‘s 1922 ―Vacation in Britany‖ appears as the second item in the magazine, directly followed by three Cubist paintings by ―Christian‖ and ―Aesthetic Meditations I: On Paintings and the Cubist Painters.‖ By positioning Stein in this way, The Little Review essentially performed the same categorizing task as Vanity Fair in a more subtle way. Still linking her work to Cubist paintings, a move frequently made then and now by critics and scholars, The Little Review attempts to provide a frame for understanding Stein‘s complex, difficult work.57 Further along in the same issue, the editors printed an explanatory piece by Sherwood Anderson simply titled: ―The Work of Gertrude Stein.‖ Anderson‘s article served as the introduction to Stein‘s first edited collection of short works, the 1922 Geography and Plays, although no reference to that book is made in the reprinting of Anderson‘s introduction in The Little Review.

56 In December 1918, the editors printed ―An Appeal to Reason‖ on this issue: ―I shall not make a list of typographical errors in the last number. I shall not apologize for them. I believe every proper name in the number was misspelled, and there are other atrocities too awful to mention.‖ 57 Jamie Hilder cautions against using contemporary understandings of Cubism as a one-to-one correspondence for interpreting Stein‘s linguistic and philosophical underpinnings. Instead, she argues, critics should take care to ―locate Stein‘s literary portraiture inside her own ideas about cubism and literary portraiture‖ (67). Only when critics fully understand what she sees when she looks at Picasso can they understand her references to Cubist art.

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So while The Little Review first presented Stein‘s words on their own, confused or interested readers could learn more about how to read her as they progressed through the magazine. In fact, Anderson‘s explanatory piece works much like the name-calling gesture in Vanity Fair‘s first publication of Stein‘s work. Anderson explains that the generally accepted view of Stein in America is that she had, ―by a strange freakish performance managed to attract attention to herself, get herself discussed in the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried, harried lives‖ (30). However, he refutes that view as shortsighted, stopping just short of calling it ―philistine‖ and calls on writers to dismiss the ―Tom Sawyerish‖ tales of Stein‘s person and to actually read and attempt to understand her work. In the words of Vanity Fair’s editors, anyone who doesn‘t do this is a philistine, ―Is one. Is one decidedly.‖ But Jane Heap let this thought rest in the words of one of Stein‘s most well-known and well-respected supporters. Whether Stein‘s work elicited any angry letters to the editor is unclear, as Heap did not print any content about Stein in the Reader Critic section of the following issue. ―Vacation in Britany,‖ subtitled ―KING OR KANGAROO KING OR YELLOW KING OR MARIE CLAIRE SUGGESTS A MEADOW. AND THE USE OF THOUGHT,‖ is a characteristically difficult Stein piece. The poem‘s first section is titled ―By the sea,‖ suggesting that the subject of the poem could be a seaside vacation. Stein‘s writing was heavily influenced by painting in this period, and, while she used some of the same literary techniques, her work had become slightly more referential than her work in Tender Buttons. In the first section, therefore, the prose is visual: ―by the sea inland,‖ ―in the midst of stones and salt,‖ ―a house is built,‖ ―the walls scale,‖ ―they whiten and the sun changes Chinese red to blue.‖ ―Immerse yourself,‖ the last line of the section reads, a charge from narrator to reader. The following section is less visual, using alliteration, wordplay, unexpected imagery, rhyme, homophones and more to create non-referential linguistic play—―To serve in a sieve and a saint. To paint and to see all the sea. To see electricity.‖ Connecting electricity to the water, a conventional trope for female identity, Stein rewrites stereotypes of female passivity. The last of the three titled sections, ―Conscience,‖ seems to fit most effortlessly with the character and mission of the Little Review. It begins, Racket is a noise. Noise is a poise. Boys with the b spelled like a p is poise. Boys is poise.

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And then I read the men. Men say. Leave me and be gay. Men say tenderness today. Men say go away. And leave me. (6) The tone of these lines is flippant, conversational, and defiant, blending seamlessly with the tone Anderson and Heap had set for the Little Review since the first issue was published. Distinguishing between boys and men, Stein underscores the Little Review‘s penchant for celebrating youth culture. Finally, the line ―leave me and be gay‖ is a precursor to ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,‖ the text that popularized the connotation of the word ―gay‖ with gay and lesbian sexualities. Anderson and Heap, openly lesbian, both used their forum as magazine editors to emphasize (when possible) the need for open discussion and acceptance of a range of sexualities. The final line of ―Conscience‖ reads: ―Let us let us conscientiously renounce the sense of reticence.‖ This line may just be a call for all of them to finally be free of the social constraints holding them back, from writing, from publishing, or from loving: Only once the ―sense of reticense‖ is flung far away can women truly live and express their identities in ways that defy conventional images of womanhood. However, the Little Review was unprepared to let go its ―reticence‖ about whether audiences would appreciate Stein‘s art and while the Cubist context in which they situated Stein‘s work may not have been a bold editorial move, advertising Stein‘s project took a delicate balance of audacity and reticence. After the Little Review published ―B.B. or the Birthplace of Bonnes‖ in Autumn 1922, Stein‘s next appearance in the Little Review is the relatively well-known poem ―Idem the Same—A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson.‖ Stein composed the poem in late 1922, shortly after finishing the final selections and arrangements for her collection of early work Geography and Plays, the December 1922 publication of which she subsidized. Reviewing (and rereading) work as far back as her 1908-1909 portraits, Bridgman claims, led Stein‘s work to turn ―tedious and mechanical again for a short time,‖ reverting back to the grammatical repetition within paragraphs that marked those early pieces, and some of this is evident in the first section of ―Idem the Same‖ (Bridgman 169). The poem opens, ―I knew too that through them I knew too that he was through, I knew too that he threw them, I knew too that they were through, I knew too I knew too, I knew I knew them.‖ Stein here uses repetition and word association to build connections across sentences, much as she does in Tender Buttons. However, the process of rereading and rearranging her work for Geography and Plays also gave Stein a profound sense of

110 achievement as she began to recognize (even more clearly) the history and importance of her artistic accomplishments. She was able to build on her earlier style and include lists, shorter lines, and repetition that isn‘t reliant on homophones. Part of ―Valentine‖ utilizes these techniques: ―Oh, very well. / All nice wives are like that. / To Be / No please. / To Be / They can please.‖ Stein builds on the dialogue form she had been working on throughout her career but the brevity and simplicity of language and lines here is more bold and self-assured. Stein‘s construction of a wifely identity is complex, in part because she is said to have reinscribed some patriarchal constructions in her own relationships. However, drawing attention to the ways women are expected not ―to be‖ but ―to please‖ pressures the hegemonic ideal. Stein suggests that subsuming the self to please others (a trait of the True Woman—―all nice wives‖) is problematic. Stein knew after arranging Geography and Plays that it was time to ―renounce the sense of reticence‖ and actively work to advance her career. Allowing herself to be published once again in a well-respected little magazine, despite the lack of remuneration she felt she deserved, was one way to advance her career, so she sent ―Idem the Same‖ to Jane Heap shortly after its composition. Stein was looking for a way to publicly thank Sherwood Anderson for his introduction to Geography and Plays, as his name gave prominence to her work. The poem that she ―gave‖ him, however, was originally composed in honor of Alice B. Toklas. Dydo, who has traced the manuscript evidence, notes that Stein‘s early drafts and notes are more personal than her final draft. Dydo writes, ―The original line ‗Very Stein is my valentine very Stein and very fine‘ becomes in print ‗Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine‘‖ (376). On the back of the notebook of one of the drafts are short lyrics to Toklas, some of which are in the final print version of ―Idem the Same.‖ The poem is composed of nine titled sections. Each section could stand alone as an individual work, in part because of the stylistic differences between sections. The first is arranged as prose, the second and third as short lists, the fourth as a series of questions, and so on. As Dydo notes, ―the valentine has a pastoral, religious tone and a formal, processional feeling‖ (376). As a love poem to Toklas, much of the poem is light-hearted. At times, the lines express childlike joy, or at least joy in childlike rhyme—―One two three four five six seven eight nine and ten. / The tenth is a little one kneeling and giving away a rooster with this feeling. / I have mentioned one, four five seven eight and nine.‖ Appearing as it does between Hemmingway‘s ―In Our Time‖ and Mina Loy‘s ―Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose‖ in

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Little Review, the light tone becomes even more prominent (Stein had only recently met Hemmingway, who visited her with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson in 1922.) Conflating authorial identity with female identity, Stein publishes a letter to Anderson that is meant for Toklas. Stein rewrites the separation of public and private that had constricted women‘s lives for centuries and has led to the devaluation of women‘s available modes of writing. However, just because the poem was titled ―A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson‖ doesn‘t mean that Stein disguised the true meaning of the poem entirely. The fifth section, ―Bundles for Them. A History of Giving Bundles,‖ is clearly a love poem to a woman. Marek underscores the risk Heap took in accepting this poem for publication as well as the risk Stein took in submitting it. ―Even from its earliest years,‖ Marek writes, ―the Little Review proved itself to be open to publishing pieces treating themes of homosexuality—for instance Gertrude Stein‘s ‗Bundles for Them,‘ Bryher‘s ‗Chance Encounter,‘ Hemingway‘s ‗Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,‘ and Jane Heap‘s ‗I Cannot Sleep‘—which increased its importance to the avant garde but also increased its danger.‖58 Despite any danger, Heap placed this poem in a prominent position in the magazine and even listed the ―Bundles for Them‖ section separately on the Table of Contents, drawing attention to it. The opening lines are in prose form, a long run-on sentence about what bundles people are carrying (―some of them were chickens some of them pheasants some of them sheep‖). Toklas recalled that Stein, at a hotel in St.-Remy, inserted into her poem ―the figures and gifts from a procession to the Christmas crèche on the mantle‖ (Dydo 376). The next lines play on association and repetition, but the poem soon moves in another direction. The last lines of the section read: If you hear her snore It is not before you love her You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely She is sweetly there and her curly hair is very lovely She is sweetly here and I am very near and that is very lovely She is my tender sweet and her little feet are stretched out well which is a treat and very lovely

58 The ―danger‖ to which Marek refers includes prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, since ―even the trial over the publication of Ulysses had more to do with authoritarian distaste for the editors‘ lesbianism than with the book‘s ‗immorality‘‖ (72).

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Her little tender nose is between her little eyes which close and are very lovely. She is very lovely and mine which is very lovely. These lines from ―Bundles for Them‖ are poignant and delicate, but there is the personal touch of the humor that comes with familiarity as well. While Stein has received criticism for displacing the worst of heterosexual gender interactions onto her own relationship with Toklas, passages such as this reveal that even if inflexible, the relationship had substantial generative power. While the poem does not generate lesbian sexuality as explicitly or as totally as the fifty- page masterpiece she composed from 1915-1917 (―Lifting Belly‖), the short nature of the poem and its less explicit references to sexuality allowed for it to be published and therefore affect American culture. Stein appeared next in an edition of the Little Review dedicated to Juan Gris.59 Preceding Stein‘s piece is Hemmingway‘s ―Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,‖ modeled after Stein‘s ―Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.‖ Stein‘s portrait of Gris is unlike her earlier portraits, which typically had few recognizable associations with their subjects. Perhaps in deference‘s to Gris‘s style of Cubism, which left objects familiar even when he defamiliarized the object‘s lines in space, Stein‘s portrait is less cryptic and more referential than much of the work she produced in the 1920s. At the same time, however, the piece harkens back to the repetition Stein used in the Making of Americans, likely due to the fact that she was then negotiating the publication of the novel in book form and as a serial in transatlantic. The portrait, however, does not work with the continuous present. The portrait begins: Juan Gris is a Spaniard. He says that his pictures remind him of the school of Fontainbleau. The school of Fontainbleau is a nice school. Diane and others. In this he makes no mistake, but he never does make a mistake. He might and he is, he is and he might, he is right and he might he right, he is a perfect painter and he might be right. He is a perfect painter painter, alright, he might be right. This opening prose section uses repetition to reinforce and elaborate on the idea that Gris‘s work is without reproach, that his methodical version of Cubism reveals truth and perfection in the

59 Gris, born Jose Victoriano González in 1887, is acknowledged, with Picasso and Braque, as one of the three greatest Cubist painters, despite a long illness and untimely death in 1927 that kept Gris from fully developing his art. Gris is known for his cubist still lifes.

113 world.60 Whether to take the narrator at her word that Gris sees his art resembling ―the school of Fontainbleau‖ is not clear, nor should it be in a Stein portrait. The connection to the school of Fontainbleau, a sixteenth century artistic movement led by Italian painters and sculptors, may as easily have been Stein‘s. Stein layers sensory experience and expresses the impossibility of two people experiencing a landscape in the same manner. The only answer to the final question of the portrait, ―do you see it look like that,‖ is yes and no. Immediately following Stein‘s poem are some reproductions of Gris‘ work, but the first prose piece following Stein‘s portrait is Jane Heap‘s ―Comment‖ section, a gossipy area where Heap keeps readers up to date on artists‘ goings-on. Again, despite the magazine‘s position as an arbiter of ―painting, sculpture, design, architecture, prose, poetry, music, dance, drama, notes on the theater, music hall, cinema, circus, sports, books, and in the triumphs, experiments…of the modern art world,‖ Heap advertises artists to readers by presenting them as celebrities (Winter 1925). In a ―comment‖ that reads much like the gossipy Vanity Fair introductions to Stein‘s work, Heap writes, ―Gertrude Stein is always living in Paris now, as she might write, always writing and experimenting. There is a great stir of interest both in England and America over her work at the moment.‖ Heap goes on to elaborate on how popular Stein‘s work is and how close to Stein is to publishing The Making of Americans , and finishes, ―Gertrude Stein is so handsome, such a mighty talker, the best host and playfellow and a first rank artist. I hope she has a hundred happy years‖ (Autumn 1924/Winter 1925 18). Here, Heap focuses on Stein as a person. Concentrating on her physical appearance, her famed ability as a conversationalist, and as a host to the literati, Heap draws from popular representations of Stein circulating in the United States at the time. Despite Heap‘s glowing praise of Stein‘s person and career, Stein wouldn‘t publish in Little Review again until its final issue in 1929. A limited edition pamphlet titled ―A Book Concluding with as a Wife Has a Cow A Love Story,‖ which featured several illustrations by Juan Gris, was released in 1926. Stein published part of this ―As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story‖ in transition in June 1927. Perhaps Stein felt a recent loyalty to transition, because when Juan Gris‘s early death stunned the art world, Stein published her retrospective of

60 Since she was so familiar with art history, Stein may have been referring in the poem to Diane de Poitiers, Henry II‘s mistress at the Palace of Fontainbleau. The king famously had Italian painters inscribe the two‘s interlocking initials (H&D) into the décor of his ballroom. The reference may indicate that Stein does not see perfection in the world, as humans inherently fail to be faithful to one another.

114 him, ―The Life of Juan Gris The Life and Death of Juan Gris‖ in transition (July 1927), rather than the Little Review. Stein‘s friendship with Jane Heap continued, however, so when Margaret Anderson solicited answers to a questionnaire she wished to publish as the final issue of the Little Review, Stein agreed. Stein writes, ―Good luck to your last number. I would much rather have written about Jane because I do appreciate Jane but since this is what you want here are my answers.‖ The editors sent the same questionnaire to all of their contributors, and while many responses to the questionnaire were brief or truculent, the final number of the Little Review reveals the impact the magazine had on writers and artists. Alongside Stein in the final issue were Djuna Barnes, Jean Cocteau, Nancy Cunard, Tristan Tzara, Janet Flanner, H.D., Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemmingway, Mina Loy, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford. The questions were: 1. What should you most like to do, to be (In case you are not satisfied). 2. Why wouldn‘t you change places with any other human being? 3. What do you look forward to? 4. What do you fear most from the future? 5. What has been the happiest moment of your life? The unhappiest (if you care to tell). 6. What do you consider your weakest characteristics? Your strongest? What do you like most about yourself? Dislike most? 7. What things do you really like? Dislike? (Nature, people, ideas, objects etc. Answer in a phrase or a page, as you will.) 8. What is your attitude toward art today? 9. What is your world view? (Are you a reasonable being in a reasonable scheme?) 10. Why do you go on living? Stein‘s answers were: 1. But I am. 2. Because I am. 3. More of the same. 4. Anything. 5. Birthday. 6. 1. Weakness, 2. Nothing, 3 Everything, 4 Almost anything.

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7. 1. What I like. 2 Hardly anything. 8. I like to look at it. 9. Not very likely or often. 10. I am Stein‘s answers were printed sideways, next to a portrait of Stein in a Ford car. In the image, her hair is cropped close, the characteristic style she had adopted only two years earlier at the age of fifty-three.

Figure 6 Gertrude Stein Little Review May 1929 In the final issue, the Little Review also printed Stein‘s ―J.H. Jane Heap Fairly Well: An Appreciation of Jane.‖ The portrait itself is typical of Stein‘s earlier portraits. She uses defamiliarizing repetition (―Whose is it when it is a name day. Whose is it when it is a name a day. Whose is it‖) alliteration and rhyme (―Jane Jane come away let the garden come and stay‖), and syntactically ungrammatical sequences (―Thank you for thinking of how do you do how do you like your two percent‖) juxtaposed with perfectly clear statements (―Jane Heap the first day stayed late in the evening‖). As Copeland points out, this portrait is the first one to combine all of

116 these techniques, a combination she had recently mastered while writing the novel Lucy Church Amiably (Language & Time & Gertrude Stein, 106-107). The overall effect of the portrait is, as the title implies, an appreciation of Jane Heap. She addresses the instant connection they felt when they first met: Jane Jane come away let the garden come and stay came late to stay in the morning came late to stay the first day in the evening She admires Jane‘s identity: Jane it is however how had how it tried that it was J.H. or Jane Heap. Jane was her name and Jane her station and Jane her nation and Jane her situation. Here, Stein connects a woman‘s name to her station, nation, and situation. She emphasizes the pliability of a name (Jane; J.H.; Jane Heap). Here, the woman‘s chosen, constructed identity supersedes the categories of womanhood usually forced upon a woman: station (whether gender or class based); nation; and situation (employment, marriage). In this ―appreciation,‖ Stein unsettles traditional methods by which society identifies and categorizes its women and replaces them with female power, control, and friendship. ―Jane Heap Fairly Well‖ was published just four short years before Gertrude Stein‘s life and career changed dramatically with the serialization of Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by The Atlantic Monthly. But in the early 1920s, when Stein struggled to get her work recognized and published, the Little Review accommodated her. The Little Review used multiple techniques to contextualize and explain Stein‘s work. The editors positioned her works near cubist art and criticism to help people understand Stein‘s words through a painting metaphor. They printed commentary and criticism on Stein, including Sherwood Anderson‘s concise review, which doesn‘t attempt to explain Stein‘s meaning, only her method and purpose. At times, the Little Review even took advantage of Stein‘s publicity and status as a celebrity in the United States. Stein may well have better learned how to position herself in the mass print market in a way that would allow her to find an audience but would also keep her artistic dignity intact. She used her methods, connections, and authorial power to rewrite the traditional models of womanhood that did not fit her life or the lives of the women she with whom she was closest. These lessons undoubtedly informed Stein‘s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and were vitally necessary as Stein nervously embarked on what would be a phenomenally successful lecture tour of the United States in the early 1930s.

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Chapter Four Alice-Dunbar and Female Authorship in Turn-of-the-Century Popular and African-American Magazines

In 1900, Atlantic Monthly rejected Alice Dunbar-Nelson‘s plan to expand a collection of her African-American stories into a novel. Editor Bliss Perry believed ―at present the American public had a ‗dislike‘ for treatment of ‗the color line‘‖ (Hull, ―Introduction, ‖ xxxvi). Two decades later, a production house rejected a Dunbar-Nelson screenplay as ―not distinctly colored enough,‖ in Dunbar-Nelson‘s words (October 20, 1921. Give Us Each Day, 97). These two points in Dunbar-Nelson‘s career reveal just how central pressures of race were to the early twentieth century magazine market. In 1900, Dunbar-Nelson faced a popular periodical press that desired literature relying on minstrel and plantation stereotypes of African Americans. By 1921, after two decades of suppressing racially-driven storylines, Dunbar-Nelson faced a new African-American press that desired literature emphasizing the achievements of black people in America. Just how was Dunbar-Nelson, a light-skinned, mixed-race, working-class writer, to publish and identify herself without doing either? In Dunbar-Nelson‘s early work, narratives of race and passing are just below the surface, while these themes become more prevalent in her later work. Dunbar-Nelson‘s most successful period of publishing came at a remarkable age. The Monthly Review Press published Violets and Other Tales, Dunbar-Nelson‘s first collection of poems, reviews, sketches and stories in 1895, when she was only nineteen. This publication is significant not just as the beginning of a remarkable author‘s career, but also as one of only a handful of published books by an African-American woman in the United States before 1900. Her second manuscript, The Goodness of St. Rouque (1899), was published alongside a collection by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, her newlywed husband. Dunbar-Nelson‘s position as the wife of the best known African-American writer of the day sometimes made it difficult for her to gain recognition for her own position as an African American author. Her career, Gloria Hull recognizes, ―was played in a late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century world where social conditions and the literary establishment made authentic self-definition (as persons and artists) extremely difficult for black women writers‖ (Introduction, xxix). Writing ―color-line‖ stories,

118 works that weren‘t ―colored enough,‖ and everything in between, Dunbar-Nelson achieved self- definition in her work and in her life. She was most successful when exploring oppositions (and connections) between her version of the ―passing‖ plot and the popular ―romance, home, consumption‖ plots saturating the magazine press. The turn-of-the-century romance plot is most easily identified by the female character‘s primary goal: to achieve a heterosexual union that consigns her to the domestic sphere. Plots involving married women focused on how a woman could best fulfill her roles as wife and mother. In the first decades of the twentieth century, fulfillment came increasingly through home and consumption. DuPlessis writes that the romance plot ―muffles the main female character, represses quest, valorizes heterosexual as opposed to homosexual ties, incorporates individuals within couples as a sign of their personal and narrative success‖ (5). DuPlessis identifies how some female authors used the romance plot to question the sexist values that generate such plots—a strategy she terms ―writing beyond the ending.‖ The early stories Dunbar-Nelson successfully published in magazines use the strategy of ―writing beyond the ending‖ to defy and (and sometimes revise) stereotypes about her race, class, and gender circulating in American culture and in the periodical press. By incorporating instances of passing, however, Dunbar- Nelson‘s work moves beyond the strategies outlined by DuPlessis. Dunbar-Nelson wrote both romance and passing narratives in her early work, at times conflating the two. In several early stories, her characters shift identities—black to white, Creole to American, rich man to servant, girl to boy. Passing is central to these early Dunbar-Nelson narratives, and it is couched within the standard script of the (seemingly) white, heterosexual romance. For popular magazines, Dunbar-Nelson‘s characters seemed to be ―all but white, ― to use Giulia Febi‘s phrase, but close reading reveals class or racial passing in many of the stories. For the African-American magazine market, Dunbar-Nelson‘s characters were recognizably black or mixed-race, and passing plays an even more prominent role in her later outwardly romance-based narratives. For both markets, Dunbar-Nelson used tropes and narrative elements of the romance to convey the theme of passing. This strategy was not born simply of necessity. That is, Dunbar-Nelson wasn‘t just passively responding to the whims of the market. She used the market for romance plots as a means of identifying herself as an African American, as a woman, and as a writer. Passing was a trope and a reality for Dunbar-Nelson and was perfectly suited to the liminal nature of her race, class, and sexuality.

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Many of Dunbar-Nelson‘s literary strategies are encompassed by her late literary philosophy, in which she claims a sharp demarcation between didactic and belletristic writing. In the newspaper and editorial columns and essays that sustained her throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Dunbar-Nelson claimed the purpose of good literature is to investigate the human condition and to entertain. There is no place, she claimed during the height of the New Negro Movement, for the ―race question‖ in literature, calling ―didacticism…the death of art‖ (―From a Woman‘s Point of View‖. February 6, 1926. P 124). In her newspaper column ―From a Woman‘s Point of View,‖ Dunbar-Nelson explained,

The real novel about, by, and for the Negro will be written only when we see clearly the sharp cleavage between the work of art and the propaganda pamphlet; when we learn to tell a story for the sake of artistry and the sheer delight of a good tale, without an eye for the probable effect of the story on the consciousness of the white man. (125)

Dunbar-Nelson found much to admire in the developing African American literary marketplace, authors she felt were not writing solely to affect the ―consciousness of the white man.‖ In a positive review of Alain Locke‘s work in her column ―As in a Looking Glass,‖ Dunbar-Nelson says that Locke has gotten the balance right.61 She writes, ―Now, when the race as a whole gets that attitude of mind—that drama, poetry, fiction must not be blatant propaganda, but ‗free‘ and subtle in their preachments, we shall have advanced a far stage toward that pinnacle of artistry which is our present goal‖ (200). In praise of Nella Larsen‘s Passing, Dunbar-Nelson claims,

The real situation is not that Clare ―passed.‖ It is that she came back into the life of Irene and that she loved Brian. She did not have to be a near-white woman to do this, nor did the others have to be colored…Of course, the author was wise in hanging the situation onto a color complex: the public must have that now. But the book would have been just as intriguing, just as provocative, just as interesting if no mention had been made of color or race. (262)

61 Dunbar-Nelson published the weekly column ―In the Looking Glass‖ in the Washington Eagle from 1926-1930. Many of her columns were syndicated for the Associated Negro Press. In 1926 (January through September), she also wrote a column for the Pittsburgh Courier called ―From a Woman‘s Point of View.‖ The title of the columns was changed to ―Une Femme Dit‖ after another newspaper appropriated the original title. She would write another column for the Courier in 1930 (January-May) titled ―So It Seems to Alice Dunbar-Nelson. These columns are witty, substantial, and vehemently feminist, political, literary, and pro-black.

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Here, Dunbar-Nelson reveals an acute awareness of the effects of various narratives and of the market for race-based fiction that was growing in the 1920s. Dunbar-Nelson is not disparaging Larsen‘s use of passing in the novel. Instead, she seems to be praising the success of the romance plot in Larsen‘s work. How are we to understand the meaning of such an unusual appraisal? Does Dunbar- Nelson‘s use of the romance plot, and her desire to see other female African American authors employ it, mark Dunbar-Nelson as just another popular writer following hegemonic scripts about gender, class, and race? Janice Radway‘s Reading the Romance concludes that the romance narrative‘s structure and storylines reify a patriarchal social and family organization and its accompanying social practices and ideologies (210). However, she also found that ―failed romances‖ are often rejected by readers expecting more scripted romances narratives. Failed romances are too close to reality, include triangular relationships, have unhappy endings, and do not focus on the development of the romance (184). Based on this theory, Passing is not a traditional romance plot. Instead, it is a model for the failed romance—the kind of romance that might serve to reject the patriarchal social and family organizations the traditional romance reifies. Here, Dunbar-Nelson praised the failure of the romance plot in Larsen‘s work, emphasizing the primary importance of gender and relationships, rather than race, in the novella. In this way, Dunbar-Nelson critiqued stereotypical female roles as painful and unfulfilling for women. Dunbar-Nelson‘s review of Passing was also heavily informed by her own bitterness about the cruelty she experienced as a light-skinned African-American woman, a bitterness she laid bare in her pseudonymous article ―Brass Ankles Speaks‖ (1929). What, then, are we to make of Dunbar-Nelson‘s use of the passing plot in stories also informed by the seemingly retrograde romance plot? To begin to answer these questions, I want to turn to recent scholarship on Dunbar- Nelson‘s work. Dunbar-Nelson‘s professed desire to separate propaganda and literature informs much of the scholarship about her. Her journalism, which outlines these ideas, was made more available by the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers‘ three-volume collection of her work in 1988. Most recently, Margot Sempreora uses Dunbar-Nelson‘s separation between literature and politics to support her claim that the writer‘s ―early local color stories lack characters explicitly identified as black, and do not directly take on issues of race, class, gender, or sexuality—issues which are certainly ‗representative‘ of her thinking in her later

121 militant journalism‖ (87). Sempreora uses Dunbar-Nelson‘s Creole characters as evidence of an ―aesthetic predicament,‖ one which prevents her from using specifically African-American characters. Gloria Hull also inscribes this separation, although she grants Dunbar-Nelson more agency than Sempreora: ―Dunbar-Nelson was the most uncomfortable of all with mixing race and belletristic literature. Throughout her career, she maintained a sharp demarcation between black concerns and literary work‖(Color, Sex, Poetry 19). Hull sees Dunbar-Nelson‘s early literature shaped by a kind of isolation from race, while she acknowledges that Dunbar-Nelson‘s later work becomes more bold about issues of racism, sexism, and oppression (Introduction WADN xxxiv). Beginning in the 1910s, Dunbar-Nelson became an outspoken civil rights activist tirelessly composing newspaper columns and essays addressing political and social issues relevant to an African-American population struggling against legalized Jim Crow discrimination. She was active in the women‘s club movement, advocated for the Dyer Anti- Lynching Bill, and helped found the Industrial School for Colored Girls. Despite a necessary focus on remaining employed (variously as a stenographer, secretary, teacher, newspaper columnist, speaker, and campaign manager), Dunbar-Nelson also championed the rights of women. Keenly aware of the fine line between being lionized and exploited, however, she chose her causes carefully. In 1921, for example, Dunbar-Nelson recorded in her diary: [A Pennsylvania clubwoman] writes me to ‗save the womanhood of Delaware,‘ which means run around and work up exhibits for her. Nothing doing….I‘m not bothered about the womanhood of Delaware. It will have to go unsaved. (Give Us This Day Sunday, October 9, 1921. P 93) While it is true that Dunbar-Nelson became a serious advocate for the rights of women and African-Americans in the 1910s and 1920s, it is not true that her early work is ―isolated‖ from race, gender, and class. Instead, Dunbar-Nelson challenged the romance plot—and the white heterosexual patriarchal ideologies it reified—by conflating the romance plot with a variety of passing plots in her early magazine publications. Dunbar-Nelson connected the conservative gender ideologies of the romance plot to dangerous representations of race and class. The romance plot emphasized the fixity of heterosexual unions, while the passing plot emphasizes dangerous assumptions underlying the concept of fixity itself.

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Dunbar-Nelson‘s narrative strategy was more than a tactic for breaking into the market or earning a paycheck, although it was also both of these things. As evidenced by the advocacy work she pursued throughout her life, Dunbar-Nelson had a stake in how women, the poor, the middle class, writers, and African-Americans were represented. Dunbar-Nelson‘s position as a twice-divorced, three times married bisexual gave her insight into the non-fixity of heterosexuality and of the heterosexual union. Dunbar-Nelson‘s light-skinned appearance was emphasized in publicity photographs throughout her career and it afforded her some privileges by travelling ―au fait‖— allowing those around her to assume she was white. Her position as a writer was also liminal. She worked full time, yet during her married years she was expected to be domestic. Wanting to work at the office with her husband, she‘s told ―not in the daytime‖ because he ―likes to run in the house and find me here—it‘s comfy and homey‖ (Give Us Each Day Aug 12, 58). As such, domestic manual labor often kept Dunbar-Nelson from being productive as a writer. Dunbar-Nelson‘s class was just as unfixed. While she travelled in some moneyed circles, she was often very poor, frequently on the verge of eviction from an apartment or home. There is a constant financial thread in her diary: ―No money. Scratching and grubbing to get enough to pay off the people…If I could only get some kind of work to tide over this wretched, wretched period‖ (Nov 21, 1921 page 111; see also Aug 8, Nov 3, Dec 9, Dec 29). The literary philosophy she delineates in the 1920s, in which she claims ―didacticism is the death of art‖ was largely a response to her inability to find ―some kind of work.‖ Publishers, Dunbar- Nelson noted, would only publish tawdry African American stories and dialect poetry. The black press would publish only stories of achievement or of racism. Therefore, Dunbar-Nelson used the traditional romance plot in order to weave African American life and ideas into her work. This helped Dunbar-Nelson avoid writing propaganda or, worse, minstrelsy. Her work embodied a double-consciousness complicated by her position as a light-skinned, mixed-race, middle-class woman in a racist, sexist, repressive late Victorian society. She used the romance plot and the passing plot in her fiction to critique the racist and sexist ideologies inherent in much of the local color writing circulating even in magazines such as Crisis and Opportunity. Contrary to the themes scholars have traditionally identified in Dunbar-Nelson‘s work, Dunbar-Nelson actually maintained a consistent focus on oppression, suppression of desire, and difference. Her early work uses the discursive practices and divergent audiences of magazines as an opportunity to quietly subvert and redress the problem of women‘s exclusion from the public realm while also

123 critically assessing racism. Dunbar-Nelson consistently refused the available templates for African-American literary characters (and African-American women in general), and instead rejected or revised character types, negotiating the in-demand romance plot with racial and class passing. I argue that analysis of her earliest magazine publications, both in the popular and the African-American press, reveals contradictions in Dunbar-Nelson‘s career and the ways race functioned in early twentieth century print culture. Dunbar-Nelson‘s work neither glorified nor stereotyped African-Americans, and her work did not always deal directly with African- American themes or life.

In the Popular Press

In 1900, Dunbar-Nelson was twenty five years old, a published author with two remarkable story collections under her belt. She had been married for two years to perhaps the most famous African-American writer of the day, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, from whom she would separate in a short two years. Her future as a writer looked promising. Like most young writers, she was eager to publish but not well-known enough to get into mass-circulation magazines. She was also too new to make a go at highbrow literary periodicals striving to satisfy old guard critics (Curtiss 46). It makes sense, then, that her first popular magazine publication appeared in the inaugural year of a new magazine struggling to find a foothold in the market, Smart Set. To fully understand Dunbar-Nelson‘s strategies for negotiation in this venue, I want to investigate the framework provided by the magazine. Smart Set, a new general literature magazine promised that its writers ―are not only those famous in the literary field, but many are from the ranks of the best society in Europe and America‖ (Smart Set Nov 1901 advertising p10, qtd in Mott, Vol 4). Despite a small budget, Smart Set developed an early reputation as a magazine with snob appeal, even printing a story every month in French. In this way, the magazine lived up to its subtitle ―A Magazine of Cleverness.‖ Before the influence of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in the 1910s, which solidified the magazine‘s status in American periodical history and its reputation as highbrow, Smart Set‘s early editors were poets. Under their direction, Smart Set achieved a ―freshness and a youthful impertinence‖ (Curtiss 45) despite what Frank Luther Mott called their ―cheap name and rather sleazy tradition‖ (4). The magazine‘s content usually came from unknown voices whose work was promising or original. The publication paid only a cent a word for submissions, in part because the magazine was not illustrated and was taking a while to

124 develop solid advertising sales (its first issue contained 160 pages of text and only 20 pages of advertising). This lack of advertising forced Smart Set to charge more for a subscription than its competitors Ainslee’s and The Red Book (25, 15, and 10 cents respectively), which kept it from reaching large circulation numbers (Mott 249). In its early years, William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), Jack London, Susan Glaspell, Theodore Dreiser, Louis Untermeyer, Ezra Pound, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson accepted the penny a word pay rate to appear in the pages of Smart Set. Dunbar-Nelson‘s connection to the famous Paul Lawrence Dunbar helped her publish in a market mostly unaccustomed to publishing black authors. The popular Leslie’s Weekly reprinted ―The Ball Dress‖ in 1901, and she appeared in Good Housekeeping, Smart Set, and Standard Union during her marriage. Her married name, ―Mrs. Paul Lawrence Dunbar,‖ identified her to readers as African-American.62 Paul Lawrence Dunbar‘s dialect poems (about which he had mixed feelings, and which Alice deplored) made him a literary celebrity in cities like New York by 1900. In fact, the Smart Set even capitalized on his name by claiming (in 1910) to have been the magazine that broke open Paul Lawrence Dunbar‘s career, despite its claim that ―it was to depend upon no authors‘ names for its popularity‖ (Smart Set. August 1910. Advertiser, second page). This exaggeration—a lie, really—by Smart Set shows the value attached to Dunbar‘s name in the literary field from before 1900 through the first decades of the twentieth century. 63 There is little reason, then, to wonder why Alice Dunbar-Nelson maintained the Dunbar name after her separation from Dunbar, after his early death, and through her next two marriages. Publication opportunities for female African-American writers were scarce. For example, while Dunbar-Nelson had managed to publish two collections by 1900, they would be the only two she managed to publish in her lifetime. The novelty of an African-American writer, while not

62 On the September 1900 Smart Set Table of Contents, she is listed as Alice Dunbar. On the title page of her story, Alice Dunbar is the first name listed, while Mrs. Paul Lawrence Dunbar follows, in parenthesis. 63 In a footnote to a reprint of O.Henry‘s ―Aagnet,‖ the editors write, ―It is a well known fact that the SMART SET has started more writers on the road to fame than any other American periodical in the past ten years. Theodosia Garrison, Gelett Burgess, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Justus Miles Forman, Guy Wetmore Carryl, Baroness von Hütten, Father John B. Tabb, James Branch Cabell, Elsa Barker, Josephine Preston Peabody, Edna Kenton, Josh Flynt and Gouverneur Morris, all got their first recognition in the pages of the SMART SET‖ (Sept 1911, 145, my emphasis). Smart Set was exaggerating, however, as Dunbar in no way got his ―first recognition‖ in its pages; they published his story ―The Lion Tamer‖ in January 1901, years after the review that launched his fame (William Dean Howells‘ review in Harper’s Weekly) and after he published Majors and Minors, Folks from Dixie, The Uncalled, Lyrics of the Hearthside and Poems of Cabin and Field. Paul Lawrence Dunbar also frequently contributed to the high-circulation Saturday Evening Post and Lippincot‘s before he appeared in Smart Set.

125 completely gone, faded between the turn of the century and the New Negro Movement. By that time, Dunbar-Nelson‘s traditional, reticent writing style excluded her from the new modernist aesthetics of the New Negro Movement. In 1900, the African American press had begun to establish itself, but nationally distributed African-American publications like the Crisis and Opportunity did not have the direction and funding to go to press until nearly a decade later. Therefore, while Dunbar-Nelson sent her work to a variety of magazines, she saw her first publication successes in newer venues. Smart Set readers familiar with Dunbar‘s name likely opened the magazine to ―The Author‘s Evening at Home‖ with expectations shaped by Paul Lawrence Dunbar‘s dialect poetry. However, the characters in the two-page play are ―all but white.‖ The husband, John, is a writer. His wife, Bess, manages their upper-class home. In the play, the husband tries to write but the wife (and his mother, who arrives for a visit) keep interrupting him, making it impossible. The play capitalizes on readers‘ desire to learn about Paul Lawrence Dunbar‘s life, as readers can easily imagine that the famous author‘s wife is really writing about his evening at home. Dunbar-Nelson‘s early magazine work, such as ―The Author‘s Evening at Home,‖ has been taken for granted by scholars, who see her early work as examples of caving to the white magazine market, or of needing to write quick fluff in order to pay the bills. However, these stories are more complex than such evaluations give them credit for. The play investigates the role of men and women in the home space. Her female protagonist refuses to silence herself and her desires, despite her husband‘s attempts to claim the space as his own. ―The Author‘s Evening at Home‖ is also an early example of Dunbar-Nelson‘s negotiation between the romance plot and passing plots. The play‘s focus is on a heterosexual union in which the wife‘s primary responsibilities are domestic. ―Writing beyond the ending,‖ Dunbar-Nelson reveals what happens after the marriage that traditionally signals the end of most romance plots. Within this revision of the romance plot, the characters in ―The Author‘s Evening at Home‖ are identifiably upper class. Because Dunbar-Nelson expected readers to assume the primary character was a version of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the play can be read as semi- autobiographical. Despite her husband‘s success, however, the Dunbars were by no means a wealthy couple. The struggled financially and frequently could not pay their bills. If ―The Author‘s Evening at Home‖ is read just as a romance, the play is a funny anecdote about the annoyances of marriage. While passing is not structurally a part of the plot of this play, the

126 autobiographical nature of the plot shows Dunbar-Nelson writing herself into the upper class. When read as a class passing plot, then, the play becomes a dynamic investigation of the ability to mimic the pretensions of the upper class. This is indicative of Dunbar-Nelson‘s early negotiations between romance and passing. Dunbar-Nelson‘s decision to submit the play to Smart Set and Smart Set’s decision to publish it also reveal a sense of the ethos of print culture at the turn-of-the-century, both for fledgling writers and for new magazines trying to fashion a sense of identity amidst a rapidly changing periodical and consumer culture. This brief play is strikingly different from her other, later plays, ―Mine Eyes Have Seen‖ (published in Crisis) and ―Gone White,‖ her most direct treatments of racism, class, the pride and shame of race, passing, and intra-racial politics. Experiencing either silence or rejection from editors and publishers when submitting stories that dealt with poverty or race, it is no surprise that Dunbar-Nelson chose to submit the less race- based play ―The Author‘s Evening at Home‖ (originally titled ―The Joys of Authorship‖) to the newly formed Smart Set. If people weren‘t interested in ―the color line,‖ then perhaps they would be interested in a snippet about a well-to-do writer frustrated in his efforts to write by his bored wife. In the play, the wife has a headache and wants her husband to amuse her. He obliges:

AUTHOR—Well, I finished two chapters. Would you like to hear them, dear? WIFE—Of course. (AUTHOR begins to read aloud.) WIFE—John! AUTHOR—Yes, dear. WIFE—Mrs. De Smythe was here today, and you have no idea how elegant she looked. She wore a gray satin suit trimmed with cut steel and gray chiffon, and her hat was a gray toque with violets.

Despite this initial sense that the wife is disrupting the author‘s work (an attempt to ―make some bread and butter,‖ as the husband puts it) it becomes clear as the play progresses that the author is actually disrupting his wife‘s time for compassionate companionship. While she may show a disinterest in his writing, he also shows a disinterest in her domestic labor. As the author writes and the wife works on her embroidery, a servant enters the room to take the breakfast order for the next day. Before she answers, the wife asks the author whether he would ―like a mackerel to-

127 morrow.‖ The stage direction that follows—―AUTHOR mutters unpublishable things and grunts for reply‖ reverses the sympathetic characterization of the author in the beginning of the sketch, the characterization that sets up the play as merely an amusing anecdote of a frustrated husband irritated by an annoying wife. It also highlights the husband‘s disinterest in the work of his wife and silences his character through ―unpublishable‖ grunts. Using one of the only tools available to domestic women (language), the wife reclaims her ―room of one‘s own‖ from her husband. At the same time that Dunbar-Nelson reveals the heterosexual union to be unsatisfying, Dunbar- Nelson also writes herself into the upper class. As an author, she can create a shifting identity for her characters and herself, one that questions the fixity of traditional boundaries in both fiction and in American society. Later in the sketch, Bess asks a question about the Boer War (1899-1902), a war between British imperial forces and white descendents of Dutch settlers in South Africa.64 She asks, ―John, if England whips the Boers, it will change things about in Africa, won‘t it?‖ He responds ―I suppose so‖ and she looks for an atlas to find ―Boer country‖ on a map. Bess‘s interest in international politics would have been unwelcome in an upper-class marriage. While men were expected to keep up with politics, women were only expected to keep abreast of household issues. After the wife finds South Africa on the atlas, her husband ―rises and seats himself beside her on the lounge.‖ He too is interested in the war, as it was widely reported upon in American newspapers and magazines. American responses to the war varied, although Boer rejection of American businesses‘ attempts at economic modernization in the area led much of the American public to side cautiously with Britain.65 As historian Lloyd Beecher writes, ―Their frustrations were inextricably linked with those of white missionaries and black Americans hoping to

64 Although a 1902 treaty seemed to grant British victory, heavy British losses in the war and in the treaty led South Africans to celebrate the end of the war as their own victory. The Boers‘ strategy of guerilla warfare led the British to burn farmland and livestock and to imprison a hundred thousand Boer women and children in concentration camps to prevent them from aiding the soldiers. As word of the camps spread to England, support for the imperialist expansion (largely driven by a desire to control the gold mines recently discovered in Boer territories) dwindled. 65 In a 1900 Associate Press reprint in the New York Times, a Berlin reporter claims ―The Boers do not possess the species of personal bravery which in European armies is self-understood.‖ (―Says Boers Were Overrated‖ May 27, 1900). A reprint from London hails British commander Roberts a national ―idol.‖ (―Roberts the British Idol‖ June 3, 1900). In 1902, a Mr. Hammond spoke to a British delegation, claiming ―The citizens who compose the important body of our population are the exponents of Americanism in highest form. They are true Americans, whether of British, German, or whatever ancestry. It is a trite but nevertheless an almost irresistible argument that our nations should stand together, because blood is thicker than water. In default of other reasons this sentiment on many memorable occasions has prevailed and saved the day.‖ Nonetheless, he warned that unless England ―condescended to explain‖ its actions better, the American people would lean toward support of the Boers. (New York Times ―America and the Boers‖ April 23, 1902.

128 regenerate Africa with Christianity and self-help programs‖ (Review, Journal of American History Vol 66 No 3 Dec 1979 pp684-685). As a woman who would eventually become a member of both the Federation of Colored Women's Club and The League of Colored Republican Women, Dunbar-Nelson likely supported programs designed to aid black Africans. The wife in ―The Author‘s Evening at Home,‖ following periodical reports of the war, may also believe that defeat of the Boers would improve native Africans‘ lives in South Africa. As one British Ambassador announced in 1899, ―As neutral as America must be, her women could not be neutral‖ (New York Times. Dec 1, 1899 ―Choate on the Boer War‖). When Bess pushes John to help her understand the conflict—―I don‘t understand what the Orange Free State is‖—he is again annoyed: ―AUTHOR explains tersely, shuts the atlas and goes back to his desk.‖ Is he irritated because she has an interest in the South African forces (rather than the British forces)? Or because he doesn‘t think it is appropriate for a woman to show such intense desire to understand the male realm of politics? Or does he just want to get back to earning ―his bread and butter‖? Dunbar-Nelson relies on such moments of ambiguity to raise questions that were better left unasked if she wanted to publish her work in popular venues such as Smart Set. She embeds discourse over male/female power struggles in the domestic home space and an inquiry into the Boer War and its meaning to women and African Americans in a brief humorous gossip play. While class passing does not play a direct role in the text, this play is a good indicator of the ways in which Dunbar-Nelson negotiates between popular romance narratives and the instances of passing that partially defined her life as a female writer. To understand just how central the romance plot was to readers of Smart Set and other turn-of-the-century literary and popular magazines, consider the pieces framing Dunbar-Nelson‘s play on the page. The poem immediately preceding ―The Author‘s Evening at Home‖ is Anita Fitch‘s ―The Little Nun.‖ Its subject is a pensive nun dreaming about love ―beyond the peace of the convent bars.‖66 In the poem, the young nun can only imagine the wonderful life that must

66 These convent stories are reminiscent of several of Dunbar-Nelson‘s stories in Violets and St. Rouque. Margaret Bauer‘s analysis of Dunbar-Nelson‘s ―convent‖ protagonists concludes that stories such as Dunbar-Nelson‘s ―Sister Josepha‖ are subtle because the author is forced to be very ―vague‖ about her characters‘ mixed blood ―for she might otherwise offend her white readers by suggesting blame.‖66 Despite Dunbar-Nelson‘s later assertion that literature should be written ―without an eye for the probable effect of the story on the consciousness of the white man,‖ the vagueness of her early fiction does suggest a conscious strategy toward publication. However, as Hall argues, the subtexts of ―Sister Josepha‖ manage to create a ―remarkable exploration of the ‗heavy door‘ of illegitimacy, racism, sexism, female vulnerability, traditional religion, and forced confinement.‖

129 follow traditional romance. The poem following Dunbar-Nelson‘s piece, ―To Maidens,‖ is signed only S.G.S. and is a simple recommendation to women: Let them argue and tease If the thing doesn‘t bore you But believe what you please When they swear they adore you. This playful poem is advice to young women who are in the courtship phase of their romances. These two poems place ―The Author‘s Evening‖ into a discourse about the nature of male/female relationships. ―The Little Nun‖ longs for a relationship beyond the convent bars; the author of ―To the Maidens‖ advises women not to take men‘s admiration too seriously, or at least to be aware that men may not mean what they say. Each poem portrays a single woman seeking a heterosexual union, abiding by cultural and social expectation. ―The Author‘s Evening‖ begins where these romances would leave off: after the marriage. The play places a woman directly within the confines of social expectations as an upper class domestic woman. However, she resists the expected identity by refusing to conform to the borders placed on her within a conventional relationship. She reclaims space through language while opening the private space to the public through an interest in international politics and foreign affairs. Dunbar-Nelson also situates the male character as the writer, even though she was a writer herself. She maintains the common cultural expectation that the male character would work and the female character would maintain the home, even though this narrative was not reflective of her own life experiences. One wonders if the male editors and mixed gender readership of the early Smart Set recognized instances of subversion in Dunbar-Nelson‘s work. Although Smart Set did not promote a gender- segregated consumer culture as aggressively as Ladies’ Home Journal or The Saturday Evening Post, it did present domesticity as the most appropriate end goal for women while also revealing those ends, and the means to achieve them, as less than satisfying for women. In many ways, this too is Alice Dunbar-Nelson‘s primary achievement in ―The Author‘s Evening at Home.‖ ―The Author‘s Evening at Home‖ is a subtle example of Dunbar-Nelson negotiating the boundaries of the romance plot to open space for an autobiographical reversal of class and gender dynamics. By her second Smart Set publication, Dunbar-Nelson‘s negotiation between romance and passing is much better developed. However, ―George Brenton, Artist‖ (January

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1902) is rarely cited in bibliographies of Dunbar-Nelson‘s published work and has never been reprinted. The story is noteworthy for the way Dunbar-Nelson negotiates the expectations of the romance plot with the dynamic meanings of the passing plot. ―George Brenton, Artist‖ begins where a traditional romance narrative structure would begin: George Brenton, bachelor artist, meets Miss Margaret Drake, unmarried maid at a party. The two become friends and Brenton regularly visits her apartment. He sees her as a comrade, but she falls in love with him. She begins to feminize her apartment, improve her wardrobe, and send him gifts, but he has no feelings for her. At the end of the story, the two have parted ways. Brenton is a traditional artist in the old sense, Dunbar writes, since ―to-day any dilettante with the ability to choose and harmonize colors is an artist.‖ Dunbar-Nelson comments on the modern artistic scene with a romance plot . This narrative strategy is designed to attract editors at magazines such as Smart Set, editors searching for stories with both ―snob‖ appeal (thus commentary on modern art) and familiar short-story plots for a mixed-gender audience (thus a romance). There is more to this strategy, however. In her writing, Dunbar-Nelson struggles to define herself as an artist. She uses male artists as primary characters and includes female counterpoints (one a wife, one an adoring friend) in both of her Smart Set publications to work through this process of self definition. At this point in her life, she is a published author, but as the wife of the most famous African- American writer in the country, she is also relegated to the secondary status she assigns her female characters in the Smart Set romances. Neither John nor Brenton struggle with conflicting roles, as Dunbar-Nelson did when trying to balance her career with unpaid domestic work. As white men, John and Brenton are also privileged in innumerable ways. However, both artists still struggle. Dunbar-Nelson recognized interruptions, the trouble and work of romantic relationships, and interference from ―dilettantes‖ as universal to all writers‘ lives. There is still more to ―George Brenton, Artist‖ than the title and this analysis of Dunbar-Nelson‘s struggle to for self-definition as an artist suggest. The story is an investigation of the romance plot and the effects of such cultural narratives on women. I also want to suggest that Dunbar-Nelson also makes it possible to read the story an example of a light-skinned woman passing for white who finally meets someone in whom she feels she can confide. Conflating these two plots, Dunbar- Nelson investigates the complexities of identity for a light-skinned African-American woman while also presenting a critique of the romance narrative which propels the plot.

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When Brenton firsts notices Margaret, ―he saw a pale, unfashionable woman a few years his senior. There was nothing striking about her, only a pair of kind, keen blue eyes and a wealth of pale-gold hair‖ (129). Margaret seems to be the picture of the content independent female, unmarried by choice, occupying rooms in an ―old-fashioned neighborhood‖: They were comparatively bare, yet graceful and cheery, and permeated with an atmosphere of purity and restfulness. There were stained floors and rugs, brass candlesticks, a couch, and a few tasteful pictures…An open fire gave the final home-like touch. There were books on all the walls. (129-130) The bare nature and restfulness of Margaret‘s apartment is reminiscent of Mademoiselle Reitz‘s home in Kate Chopin‘s The Awakening, functioning as a symbol of female security and independence. Margaret is well-read, comfortable, and rested. This domestic space is neither confining nor restricting, allowing her to ―live the independent life of the modern woman—part student, part dilettante, part philanthropist.‖ Her friendship with Brenton grows as his visits to her apartment become more frequent. Brenton is enthused with the situation because he feels they are comrades with no romantic possibilities. ―She is the only woman I‘ve met,‖ he muses, ―whom I don‘t feel that I must propose to if I make frequent calls‖ (130). Margaret was in need of friends, the narrative suggests, because she was ―a woman without kindred, without ties‖ (130). Brenton is not the first friend who sees the advantage of Margaret‘s kind nature. Dunbar- Nelson writes, Perhaps the reason her friends loved her was because she never talked of herself. Instead, she was the repository of all sorts of confidences, from transcendental revealing and quixotic business schemes to love affairs of very young men. She had a sympathetic ear for everyone, and a seemingly limitless fund of enthusiastic encouragement. (130) These two strange details—a lack of family and a desire not to discuss her own life—appear early in the story and are the first real details Dunbar-Nelson reveals about Margaret. This is a common trope in narratives of passing in the early twentieth century. In later works such as ―The Pearl in the Oyster,‖ Dunbar-Nelson identifies passing characters by their need to avoid contact with friends and family from the past, and with their desire not to discuss much about themselves with white people. Why Margaret feels so comfortable with George Brenton is not made entirely clear in the narrative. There are no physical descriptors to suggest Brenton himself is passing, or that he is mixed race. The lack of physical description leaves open all possibilities.

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Margaret doesn‘t begin to show a desire for Brenton until a conversation in which he describes his ―ideal‖ woman. He explains to Margaret, She is tall and slim and dark-haired…she is gay and cheery and not too wise. She will be a companion to me in every sense of the word; just such a comrade as you are, Margaret dear, only much more so, of course, for she will be my wife. (131) Margaret expresses concern: ―Perhaps Ideala won‘t have room in her heart for the little old maid,‖ but Brenton assures her ―My Ideala will be such a big-hearted woman that she will have room for all my dear friends‖ (131). After this discussion, Margaret decides her rooms are ―unfeminine, unhomelike‖ and begins to feminize her decorations, draping her chairs in silk and beginning to wear ruffled dresses (132). The narrative continues only from Brenton‘s point of view; readers are left to hypothesize Margaret‘s feelings through her actions in the story. She begins to send Brenton expensive and thoughtful gifts and even kisses him abruptly one night, only to apologize the next morning. These moves make Brenton ―conscious of a creepiness that amounted almost to repulsion‖ (132). In his studio, he is irritated by the sight of her gifts to him and ―he felt that he was being taken possession of and that his struggles would be in vain‖ (132). What struggles, readers wonder, would be in vain? His struggle to develop a reputation as ―George Brenton, Artist‖? Racial struggles? His struggle to remain a bachelor? He has claimed he wants to marry and that he has no interest in Margaret, so this seems unlikely. Still, he continues to frequent Margaret‘s apartment. She begins to use perfume, to wear nicer dresses, and to send Brenton a daily note of appreciation. Dunbar-Nelson is using the romance narrative to advance her plot. Falling in love with Brenton, Margaret is willing to give up her comfortable lifestyle and her independence. She claims to be ―awkward‖ because of her long years alone. However, she has learned the details of the romance, which clearly outlines the steps a woman should take to make a man fall in love with her. The perfumes, decorations, notes, and clothing are all an attempt to shift from an independent selfhood to the construction she felt was necessary to ―woo‖ Brenton. The type of woman Margaret now represents has its counterparts on the cover of women‘s magazines of the period. She is just an image; she is trying to become ―Ideala,‖ possibly a white idealization. The uncanny representation is awkward in Margret not because she lacks some essential female quality, but because it clashes with the worldly, wise, independent woman readers get to know

133 through the beginning of the story. Brenton is confused. He is attracted and repulsed by Margaret‘s attentions. Brenton thinks he ―would as soon have acted frivolously with his mother. Yet at the thought of Margaret‘s caresses he shivered and was filled with great dread of seeing her again.‖ Nonetheless, he cannot stay away. Brenton feels repulsed by the changes he sees in her, even as he imagines her as a romantic possibility: The possibilities of love, of marriage, of devotion without marriage, even, were easy to think of now in connection with Margaret. Still, he shuddered and felt uncanny, and thought of creepy things when she touched him with caressing hands. (133)

Following Brenton‘s reactions to the new Margaret, the narrative offers conflicting messages. Brenton is repulsed by Margaret, yet she ―touched him with caressing hands.‖ He considers marriage and even ―devotion without marriage,‖ leaving open the possibility that Brenton has already had a sexual relationship with Margaret. ―Devotion without marriage‖ is not a part of the traditional romance plot as it appears in early twentieth century periodical literature. Read as a romance plot, Brenton may see Margaret as a ―sisterly‖ comrade because she is an independent woman. Many early twentieth century narratives of failed romance hinged on a woman‘s refusal to give up her independence for love. However, this narrative also leaves open the possibility that Brenton is ―repulsed‖ by Margaret because he believes her to be African-American. He describes his feelings for Margaret as an ―odd sense of shame and confusion‖ and as a ―creepiness that amounted almost to repulsion‖ (132). ―When he was alone, he cursed himself for his weakness, but the evening found him with her‖ (133). Read as a passing plot, Brenton is attracted to Margaret, but he is ashamed of being attracted to an African-American woman. A victim (or perpetrator) of turn-of-the century racism, Brenton is repulsed less by Margaret than by his attraction to Margaret. In one of the final scenes of the story, on the eve of Brenton‘s departure on a long journey, Brenton‘s conflicted feelings for Margaret cause him to want to get away from her. In the scene, Brenton wants Margaret to remain like the idealized Mother figure—loving and unselfish with no demands in return. Margaret to him is the best of both worlds: he has a comrade with whom he can discuss art, and, because she is still a woman, a selfless individual there only to serve his ego and needs. He has exploited her friendship by leading her on. In this scene, Brenton has visited Margaret‘s apartment but stays only for a few minutes. ―With a

134 determined look on his face,‖ Brenton declares that he must go because there are ―many to whom I must say good-bye‖ (133). ―Many?‖ she echoed, ―am I to see nothing of you? Have I no claim on you? Who are the many? … You are inconsiderate; you don‘t care!‖ She was white with anger and her eyes blazed. For a minute Brenton was dazed. The thought of Margaret—the gentle, unselfish Margaret—in a pet, was so new that he required time to get accustomed to it. He gazed at her blankly, then said, dully: ―You are very selfish, Margaret.‖ (133) Brenton‘s insult—―You are very selfish, Margaret‖—plays on the socially constructed ideal often accepted as a ―natural‖ female trait in ―good‖ women—selflessness. Margaret finally shakes off her newly acquired ―Ideala‖ character and fights for what she believes is rightfully hers—Brenton‘s time. The next scene marks the climax of ―George Brenton, Artist.‖ The following day, Brenton again comes to visit Margaret. The scene is quoted here in full: ―George,‖ she said, softly, ―there is something I want to tell you, something I must say. I‘ve been wanting to tell you for some time, but it was hard to begin.‖ The sweat broke out on Brenton‘s face. He grasped the arm of his chair to steady his reeling brain. What was coming? ―I never told you,‖ she went on, ―why I never married. It‘s a pitiful little story, and somehow I feel that I owe the telling of it to you. It was—‖ But Brenton put out his hand and clutched her arm. ―Stop, Margaret!‖ he cried, wildly, ―don‘t—don‘t tell me. I have no right to know anything of your past life, and you have no right to tell me. I don‘t want to know, don‘t!‖ She turned and looked at him wonderingly, and a certain hardness came into her face. Brenton rose desperately. ―Margaret,‖ he continued, ―I am a brute, a hulking criminal, I know, but I must say it. Don‘t you see I understand? Can‘t you understand, too?‖ She shook her head, and he saw tears come into her eyes. ―Margaret, don‘t look like that, I can‘t help it. Have you misunderstood me? It‘s your fault, of course; I must blame someone;‖ he laughed nervously, and took her hands into his. They were limp and inert. ―It can‘t be, dear; it‘s no use. I am going now; good-

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bye,‖ and he turned and went out. He saw her before the door closed, standing still and white, the rose-pink dress casting a glow over her drawn face that made it all the more ghastly. (134) In the romance narrative, this scene can be read as a desire to confess her love, but in a passing narrative, it can easily be read as her desire to confess her ethnicity to a man who she feels would understand. The tensions between the romance and passing plots are used to great effect in this scene. The romance fails precisely because of Margaret‘s race. This scene makes clear what could only be supposed earlier in the story—that Brenton knows Margaret is passing. He does not let Margaret ―confess,‖ but instead confesses himself—―I am a brute, a hulking criminal…Don‘t you see I understand?‖ This scene also makes clear the fact that Margaret had no idea Brenton already knew, nor that he would react with shame, repulsion, and guilt. Only once he refuses to let her tell her story does ―a certain hardness‖ come into her face. It is at this moment that she fully understands his behavior and his feelings. The romance plot has ―failed,‖ because it did not end in a heterosexual marriage. The passing plot, however, has successfully revealed the complexity and deleterious nature of passing. Almost inexplicably, Margaret still shows up the next day at the train station to wish Brenton well, claiming they‘ll always be friends and leaving Brenton feeling ―as if a great load had been lifted from his shoulders.‖ This ending risks leaving readers understanding Margaret as a little old maid who realizes she‘s overstepped her bounds, Brenton a man who has escaped the overreaching arms of ―a pale, small, unfashionable woman a few years his senior.‖ However, when Margaret meets him on the platform, she has reclaimed her previous independent identity. She meets him out in public, rather than in the dim light of her apartment. ―She was dressed in her old-time, plain, unfashionable dress; her hair under the little old hat was drawn back severely, as in the old days when he had first known her.‖ Shaking off the unreality of ―Ideala‖ and finally recognizing Brenton as a threat to her definition of herself, she arrives at the train station not to ingratiate herself to him but to meet him on neutral territory to dismiss him. In this reading, Margaret‘s independence is the trade-off for her decision to pass, rather than a conscious expression of feminist ideals. If Margaret can be read as passing, it makes sense to understand her final decision to meet Brenton on the train platform as means to sever ties from him. Conflating passing with a romance plot, Dunbar-Nelson maintains her ability to refuse the minstrel stereotypes audiences expected of an African-American writer without abandoning her

136 authorial identity as a mixed-race, middle-class feminist. Publications like ―George Brenton, Artist‖ present Dunbar-Nelson as an author consciously negotiating the literary market to suit her literary ambitions and her desire to write about the people and places closest to her heart. As she reveals in the pseudonymous essay ―Brass Ankles Speaks‖ later in her career, Dunbar-Nelson had been accused of passing due to her light complexion and Caucasian features, and she had been forced into companionship with other light-skinned African Americans over the course of her life, tormented by ―dark‖ African-Americans. The essay was never published. Hall writes, ―She tried to publish it, but would not or could not do so under her own name, and the magazine editor refused to print it pseudonymously‖ (Introduction xxxvi). Dunbar-Nelson claims to be writing the essay because ―it seems but fair and just now for some of the neglected light-skinned colored people, who have not ‗passed‘ to rise and speak a word in self-defense,‖ since so many essays had recently been written about passing. Dunbar-Nelson was fired from a department store job once because it was ―discovered‖ that she was not white (311). As she explains, however, ―I had applied for a job in the stock room where all the employees are colored, and the head of the placing bureau told me that was no place for me—‗Only colored girls work there,‘ so he placed me in the book department, and then fired me because I had ‗deceived‘ him‖ (320). Dunbar-Nelson continues, Small wonder, then, that the few lighter persons in the community drew together; we were literally thrown upon each other, whether we liked or not. But when we began going about together and spending our time in each other‘s society, a howl went up. We were organizing a ‗blue-vein‘ society. We were mistresses of white men. We were Lesbians. We hated black folk and plotted against them. As a matter of fact, we had no other recourse but to cling together. Dunbar-Nelson did in fact pass occasionally for theater tickets or other conveniences, but she was very proud of her African-American heritage. ―Brass Ankles Speaks‖ reveals the depth of turmoil she experienced as a light-skinned woman, and also reveals mixed emotions about those who did choose to pass. Her attitude about a character such as Margaret is unclear. In ―Brass Ankles Speaks,‖ Dunbar-Nelson hypothesizes, ―if it be true that thousands of us pass over into the white group each year, it is due not only to the wish for economic ease and convenience, but often to the bitterness of one‘s own kind….It is not so much that they dislike their darker brethren, but the darker brethren DO NOT LIKE THEM‖ (321). Dunbar-Nelson sympathizes

137 with people who pass, even though she counts herself as one of the class who is ―white enough to pass for white, but with darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race‖ (311). Passing intersected frequently with the romance plot in Dunbar-Nelson‘s work, and it also intersected in her life. In her essay, she explains the humiliation she felt when she was turned down by a dark-skinned African-American boy at her school because she was too fair-skinned. Still, it is possible to have no pity for Margaret in ―George Brenton, Artist,‖ as she has chosen to reject her heritage and pass for white. Neither Margaret nor Brenton are easy to like. In this way, Dunbar-Nelson‘s negotiation with the magazine market, its ideologies, its stereotypes, and its readers, continued to focus on passing and on romance, continually interrogating the tension between the two plots. The interrogation showed that the ideologies and stereotypes influencing our attitudes about personal relationships, gender roles, and race are constructed by the narratives we seek as entertainment and can be deconstructed by careful reading. In a previously undiscovered publication from January 1903, Dunbar-Nelson continues to explore these tensions between the romance plot and passing plots. ―A Romance of the Kitchen‖ appeared in Good Housekeeping magazine shortly after a painful separation between Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. In this story, the descriptions of the characters suggest that they are African-American, but the story focuses its inquiry of passing instead on class passing. ―A Romance of the Kitchen‖ focuses on Lina, a young woman who is acting as a ―servant‖ for her brother, whose wife has fallen ill. She flirts with David, a young man in the next house, who appears to be a new servant but in reality is only helping out his sister, whose servant is ill. Both characters in this romance plot pass as working class. This continues for three weeks before Lina discovers David‘s true identity. Their flirtation then continues at a distance for some time. Eventually, the two are properly introduced at a party. Within two weeks, they are each relieved of their servant duties (the wife and servant recover), and the two eventually marry. Gloria Hull concludes that Dunbar-Nelson used wealthy characters because Dunbar-Nelson desired to be rich herself and associated ―white‖ with ―rich‖ and vice versa (xlii). However, in stories such as ―George Brenton, Artist‖ and ―A Romance of the Kitchen,‖ the characters are not necessarily white. In ―A Romance of the Kitchen,‖ the characters may be rich, but the romance advances under the illusion that the object of each character‘s affections is actually poor. Moving in some economically privileged circles but financially insecure herself, Dunbar-Nelson‘s

138 inclusion of class passing in her narratives is in part her effort at self-definition. Using the page both to explain and to understand her identity, she also uses class passing as another way to investigate racial passing and romance narratives. Noteworthy for its previous exclusion from Dunbar-Nelson‘s recognized oeuvre, ―A Romance of the Kitchen‖ relies on class passing and the strict rules of female propriety as the source for its central conflict. Class and gender dynamics are disrupted further by Dunbar- Nelson‘s strategy of including subtle details that mark the main character as African-American. Lina catches David‘s gaze at the beginning of the story: Lina tossed her head angrily. ―The Swifts‘ have a new cook, and he thinks I‘m a servant, and is trying a kitchen flirtation. Ugh!‖ … All the rest of supper-getting time, however, she found her gaze resting above the muslin curtain, and she could see a close cropped brown head stirring swiftly about the kitchen, evidently bent on the same errands as her own. (39) The narrator frequently repeats the synecdoche of ―brown head‖ for David, the servant, emphasizing that he is not white, and also emphasizing that he is not yet identified. At this point in the story, readers aren‘t aware that David is actually a member of the Swift household, rather than just a servant. Lina keeps telling herself that as an ―aristocrat‖ she should not be interested in a servant. Nonetheless, she is attracted to the ―closely cropped brown head.‖ Only after Lina has become more overt in her correspondence with the next-door servant does she (and readers) discover his true identity. David is the younger brother of her neighbor. While studying for the state bar exam, he has offered to help out in the kitchen because their servant was ill. Careful not to feminize his character, Dunbar-Nelson explains that he learned to cook while ―camping out abroad‖ (41). This is very different from how Lina learned to cook. ―She had learned under her mother, who believed that the whole end of man is to eat and the whole end of woman to cook things for him to eat‖ (40). Now that Lina knows David is not just a servant, she allows the flirtation to advance to exchanging food (leaving it on the kitchen windowsill). Dunbar-Nelson maintains some traditional gender roles in this romance plot, in part to balance out the subversive class passing, the identification of the male character as African-American, and Lina‘s dismissal of feminine propriety (by pursuing an unsupervised flirtation with a man she believes to be poor). Using a narrative strategy Kristina Brooks identifies as ―white/dark oppositions,‖ Dunbar- Nelson emphasizes the importance of her character‘s race through the image of a white curtain.

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―She raised her eyes over the white muslin curtain that veiled the lower half of the kitchen window‖; ―the close cropped brown head could be seen moving swiftly and surely about the kitchen…ever and anon casting a glance over the muslin curtain‖ (39, 40). Once Lina discovers David‘s identity as the neighbor‘s brother, she is ―glad that the owner of the eyes and brown head was not a mere servant after all‖ (41). Only then do readers learn that ―the muslin curtain had long since come down as being too much a barrier to their communications‖ (41). In this instance, Dunbar-Nelson uses the white muslin curtain not only to emphasize race but also to serve as a barrier to class interaction. Only once the curtain (reminiscent of DuBois‘s image of the veil as a representation of the color line) is removed can the young man and woman advance their courtship. While contemporary readers may be disappointed or frustrated by the easy plot twist that ―reveals‖ David to be upper class and allows the two cooks to complete their romance, for Dunbar-Nelson, class difference was a serious social reality and, as Hull points out, she was ―ambivalent about dark-skinned, lower-class blacks‖ (20). Always struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, Dunbar-Nelson‘s middle and upper class characters are a reflection of her own life. She never shied away from lower class characters, but in her Creole and ―Steenth Street‖ stories, interactions between different classes frequently represent danger and intrusion (see―The Revenge of James Brown‖ and ―Sister Josepha‖). In ―A Romance of the Kitchen,‖ all characters are in the same class, eliminating possible danger in the romance. Nonetheless, this unusual courtship breaks the social etiquette, as the couple interacts without supervision and outside the typical forms of interaction. ―Writing within the script,‖ as Alisa Johnson puts it, Dunbar-Nelson adheres to the narrative romance plot while subtly disrupting its boundaries within the story. The equality and culinary basis of their relationship must be hidden from their families. When Lina wants to watch David cook, she escapes to an unused room above the kitchen. Interestingly, this recalls both Woolfe‘s call for a ―room of one‘s own‖ and also Gilbert and Gubar‘s ―the madwoman in the attic.‖ Lina claims a space for her own use outside the patriarchal implications of the kitchen, but this move also positions her as a ―monster‖ of sorts, forced outside the boundaries of the home space. The couple‘s public persona must be based on piano playing and song, the appropriate and ―more congenial‖ topics between a man and woman: ―When David called in the evenings, Lina was all decorum before her brother and sister, and no one would have guessed as they sang and played together that the best of their friendship was out in the kitchen‖ (42). Just as Lina claims the

140 room above the kitchen for herself, she also reclaims the kitchen as a feminist space in which she can pursue her own desires and interests. This choice, however, is only made available by her class. When the true servants return to the households, they are without choices about how to use the space of the kitchen. To the servants, the kitchen is a site of labor. Nonetheless, the romance ends with the typical happy ending—an engagement. The engagement promises an egalitarian partnership based on mutual interests and respect, a reading reinforced by the direct authorial comment that ends the story—―I know their kitchen will be a dream‖ (42). Because Dunbar- Nelson is ―writing within the script,‖ Good Housekeeping readers are still satisfied by the fun and romance of the narrative. Dunbar-Nelson published this story during a bitter separation from her husband. As Johnson writes about Dunbar-Nelson‘s ―Ellen Fenton,‖ written near the same time, ―That her mind and heart could imagine for another what she herself had not known is the ultimate testament to her spirit and to the grandeur of her imagination‖ (174). Dunbar-Nelson would eventually find her own somewhat egalitarian engagement with her third husband, the poet Robert Nelson.67

Beyond an exploration of alternative gender dynamics, ―A Kitchen Romance‖ also presents perceptive readers with a vision of middle-class African American life at the turn of the century. Perceptive readers could read the story as a playful narrative about middle-class African- American romance. With Jim Crow regulations enforcing racism, white editors and readers refusing to recognize African-American literary ambitions beyond minstrel or dialect fiction and poetry, and with reports of over one-hundred African Americans lynched in 1900, presenting a romantic, normalized African-American upper or middle-class couple was indeed a radical departure from the available images of African-American men and women in the periodical press. Dunbar-Nelson places her characters in the unusual position of passing for poor. In this way, Dunbar-Nelson shows that African-American society spans a wide spectrum of classes.

67 I call the relationship ―somewhat‖ egalitarian because of Dunbar-Nelson‘s comments on her role in the marriage in her 1921 diary. The diary entries reveal the complex negotiations middle-class female authors had to make in order to keep their homes and work in order, pressures not likely felt by male or upper-class authors. On Sunday, August 7, for example, Dunbar-Nelson writes, ―[Elizabeth] wants to know if it is a sin to wash clothes on Sunday…I said no. Bob O [Robert Nelson, her husband] would be horrified, for he is perfectly sure it‘s a sin to wash necessary clothes on Sunday but it is not a sin to type-write, write newspaper articles, go on excursions, cook huge dinners, commit adultery, or plan political coups which will result in another man‘s downfall.‖ On Friday, August 12, Dunbar-Nelson writes, ―I doubt if any man has a wife who helps him more. No flattery to myself either. He said today he likes me at the office—evenings when he‘s there alone, but not in the daytime. Likes to run in the house and find me here—it‘s comfy and homey. Poor fellow, he wants a home as much as I do. But we can‘t even pay board here, it seems.‖ See also her 1921entries on September 12 and September 18.

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Unlike the common representations of African Americans in popular magazine like Good Housekeeping, Dunbar-Nelson‘s representation is complex and fair-minded. To better understand the representations of African Americans that made up the racial discourse of the popular magazines Dunbar-Nelson sought for publication, I want to turn to the edition of Good Housekeeping in which ―A Romance of the Kitchen‖ appeared. Unlike Smart Set, which was newly established, Good Housekeeping was founded in 1885 as a middlebrow magazine directed at middle to lower middle class women. In the illustrations, advertising, articles and stories in the magazine, there is no appeal to or recognition of African-American women. This was in line with other household and mainstream magazine of the time. By the time Dunbar-Nelson‘s story appeared, the ten-cent monthly‘s circulation was approaching 200,000 and it contained twenty to thirty pages of good advertising, marking it as one of the higher circulation and better established popular women‘s magazines of the day (Mott Volume 5, 132). From the start, Good Housekeeping had a literary quality. As Mott observed, however, ―The poems and short stories, though they gave the magazine much of its special character, were subordinate to the articles and advice on household affairs, cookery, dressmaking, house- designing and furnishings, and such miscellany as puzzles, quiz games, query departments and so on‖ (5). Articles in the January 1903 number range in subject, including articles on Chinese women‘s lives, on education (music, housekeeping) for girls, home handicraft discoveries (sent in by readers), babies, food safety, and recipes. Because the magazine did not rely heavily on fiction, the only short story aside from ―A Romance of the Kitchen‖ is a tale titled ―Polly and the Boojum Wedding.‖ Interestingly, this is also the only other mention of African-Americans in the entire volume. A comparison of the two stories shows exactly how revolutionary Dunbar- Nelson‘s presentation of romance, passing, and African-American characters was. In ―Polly and the Boojum Wedding,‖ young Polly stays in an unfamiliar room on a visit to New York with her mother. In the room are eight dolls, including an Uncle Sam doll, ―a droll little black Zulu and a big, terrible creature whom Polly called Boojum,‖ a doll purchased in Africa and made ―by one of the natives.‖ The doll (and in fact part of the plotline of the story) is based on the Golliwog character popularized in Florence Kate Upton‘s 1895 The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls.68 A doll in the book was based on an ―ugly‖ black minstrel doll Upton owned as a child. The book

68 All information about the origins of the Golliwog caricature and stereotype is taken from the Web site of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a museum run by Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Susan Booker Morris is the Museum Coordinator and Dr. David Pilgrim is the Curator.

142 became so popular that Upton published twelve more books based on the minstrel doll—each time with ―Golliwogg‖ in the title. According to the Jim Crow Museum, ―The Upton Golliwogg was adventurous and sometimes silly, but, in the main, gallant and ‗lovable,‘ albeit, unsightly. Later Golliwogs were often unkind, mean-spirited, and even more visually hideous.‖

Figure 6 The Good Housekeeping illustrations for “Polly and Figure 7 The Golliwog caricature was the Boojum Wedding” rely on the “Golliwog” caricature, best popularized in England in the late 1890s. seen in the illustration on the upper half of the page. Image from The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/golliwog/

Toys based on the books became a favorite European children‘s toy. Consumer objects that belittled African-Americans and black Europeans, the Golliwog dolls were surpassed only by the Teddy Bear in popularity. In the anonymously-published Good Housekeeping story, the character based on the Golliwog stereotype, Boojum, threatens to kill the other dolls but says, ―I shan‘t barbecue any of you white people, I‘m going to broil that little Zulu over there beside Uncle Sam. He‘s dark meat.‖ Uncle Sam defends Zulu. He roars, ―I‘ve got millions of dark meat

143 people in my country; he‘s a cousin of them. I won‘t let you hurt him!‖ Uncle Sam informs the dolls that Boojum is only pretending to be mean and a planned wedding between a Swedish doll and Boojum takes place. They all dance until the sun comes up, when they go back to being inanimate dolls. The dangerously racist reference to ―dark meat people‖ reinforces stereotypes of black brutality and violence and dehumanizes African Americans. The image reinforces the idea that the government (Uncle Sam) protects African-Americans (Zulu), an idea that did not accurately reflect the reality of African American‘s lives in the United States. The illustrations rely on common visual stereotypes of African Americans circulating in American and English culture in the day. This story is the only obvious reference to African Americans in the one- hundred page issue of Good Housekeeping. Such is the ―family-oriented‖ periodical culture Dunbar-Nelson entered when ―A Romance of the Kitchen‖ appeared in the same issue of Good Housekeeping. ―A Romance of the Kitchen‖ serves as a corrective to the Golliwog stereotype perpetuated in this same issue of Good Housekeeping in ―Polly and the Boojum Wedding.‖ When Dunbar-Nelson published in mainstream, popular magazines, she was always fighting an uphill battle against the brutal, dehumanizing assumptions and stereotypes of African- Americans, of the poor, and of women that were commonly accepted and perpetuated by the periodical press.

In the African-American Press

While mainstream magazines continued to stereotype or exclude African Americans, a smaller niche market developed near the turn of the century for magazines devoted to African- American causes, culture, and literature. When Dunbar-Nelson and other writers published in the venues that filled this niche, they were writing for a much different audience than the white middle-class audience of mainstream periodicals. The audience for African-American magazines was primarily the black middle class but included liberal whites, Native Americans, and working class African-Americans as well. As Lena Horne‘s daughter and biographer wrote, ―The Crisis lay next to the Bible in most middle-class African American homes‖ (Buckley 201). Writing for this market, Dunbar-Nelson continued to negotiate between the romance plot and passing plots. However, her characters in these publications were recognizably black and more likely to be poor. The characters are not always sympathetic or likable—she continually refuses to offer easy identification with the characters. To begin to understand the African-American market that

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Dunbar-Nelson was joining, I want to turn to her first large-circulation African-American venue, The Southern Workman.

In an a 1903 review, the New York Times recognized The Southern Workman as ―one of the most interesting of the swarm of periodicals in our country‖ with a ―large circulation.‖ (April 11, 1903). The Southern Workman (1881-1929) was the official journal of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, founded in 1868 for the education and training of African Americans and Native Americans. In 1900, the Institute enrolled 861 African Americans and 132 Native Americans and stated that its ―object is to train teachers for the public schools and make industrial leaders for the two races‖ (May 1900, inside front cover). The school‘s journal served to chronicle the achievements of the school, its programs, its students and graduates, and African Americans and Native Americans across the country. The Southern Workman regularly published African-American writers, covering a range of subjects, at a time when the African- American periodical press was struggling to gain footing in the larger market. ―It is devoted,‖ the New York Times review claimed, ―to what may be called the current literature of those races, and to the description and discussion of their nature, their work, their needs, their life.‖ The goals of popular magazines like Smart Set and Good Housekeeping was to attract a specific audience and to make money through advertising. The goals of African-American periodicals were similar, but the magazines also wanted to be a source of positive information about African-American achievements. The magazines struggled to secure advertising and to pay contributors. While no price is listed on The Southern Workman, a call for bequests to support their endeavors is listed on the first page. Several pages of advertising begin and end each issue—ranging from the ―Flushomatic‖ water closet to John Wannamaker literary collections. Most of the advertisements in the journal were for local products, rather than nationally-advertised products. The Southern Workman‘s budget for advertising was low, and many advertisers were unwilling to be associated with an African-American magazine. The journal‘s readers likely included liberal whites, middle to upper class African Americans and Native Americans, and also black households with a desire to keep up-to-date on African American achievements in education and industry—including graduates and ex-students of the Hampton Institute itself. Dunbar-Nelson found a sympathetic and regular venue in The Southern Workman at the turn of the century, no doubt in part due to her husband‘s name (Paul Lawrence Dunbar was a regular contributor, appearing five times in 1900 alone). Linking Dunbar-Nelson to her husband

145 in a review of The Goodness of St. Rouque, a Southern Workman editor writes, ―For the reader of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and who among our own readers is not one?—there is a special interest in the dedication of his wife‘s book: ‗To my best comrade, my husband‘‖ (January 1900, 187). Nonetheless, the journal took Dunbar-Nelson‘s fiction seriously. The review continues with a perceptive analysis of the work: ―The plots are slender but not weak; many of the sketches are somber, some are pitiful; none are crude and none are so dreary in their sadness as certain stories of New England life to which one instinctively turns for comparison or contrast‖ (188). The journal praises her achievement as a local color writer: ―By these fourteen short stories we are put in touch with the Creoles of New Orleans; we hear their soft, caressing dialect‖ (188). The Goodness of St. Rouque propelled Dunbar-Nelson‘s career and shaped her reputation as a local color writer. Local color work, especially Creole stories, was highly marketable at the turn of the century. Like Kate Chopin‘s New Orleans work, Dunbar-Nelson‘s presents an open, stratified community strong on ideals and playfulness. Her first two publications in The Southern Workman, the short story ―Edouard‖ (June 1900) and ―Esteve, the Soldier Boy‖ (November 1900) are New Orleans stories in much the same vein as her work in The Goodness of St. Rouque. ―Esteve, the Soldier Boy‖ follows Esteve, a young black boy kidnapped from New Orleans in 1814 while cheering on a battalion of freed men of color, while ―Edourd‖ is about a young man whose uncle takes him to New Orleans to learn cigar-making. ―Edourd‖ is noteworthy for its inclusion of a fear of ―dynamism,‖ a common thread in much turn-of-the century literature but not common to Dunbar-Nelson‘s work. In her fiction, danger lies not in external forces but in the desires, prejudices, and actions of men and women. Her third publication in The Southern Workman, ―Lesie, the Choir Boy‖ (November 1901) is similar, although it takes for its location ―‘Steenth Street,‖ a working class area in New York. These stories showcase Dunbar-Nelson‘s best writing: rich descriptions of Louisiana (and New York) geography and customs, a rhythmic narrative, a plotline (if ―slender‖) that drives to the heart of human dignity, grief, and behavior. These early stories deal with poor, Creole and white young men sympathetically, perhaps because she was writing for an African-American publication. Compared to the characters filling her first two volumes (published for a mixed audience), Esteve, Edourd, and Lesie are less tragic and somber, even though their lives are difficult. This matches well with The Southern Workman‘s editorial inclination to include works showcasing African-American achievement.

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Dunbar-Nelson‘s local color publications in The Southern Workman eschew the romance plot, in part because the characters are quite young. Dunbar-Nelson‘s romance plots are often failed romances made more complex by passing. This theme didn‘t mesh well with the stories she wrote about the young men and women of New Orleans and New York. Many of the stories Dunbar-Nelson published in The Southern Workman, however, expand her reputation as a local color writer, even as she maintained her focus on individual characters in individualized, specific locations. In these stories, Dunbar-Nelson again picks up the romance and passing plots. The iterations of these plots in her publications for the African-American press, however, are much more complex than what she published in popular magazines. Not reducing passing to white/black or rich/poor (as she did in Good Housekeeping and Smart Set), Dunbar-Nelson uses Creole characters to represent the complexity of ethnic identification and uses local custom to shift the focus of the romance plot away from courtship and toward the the effects of patriarchy. Perhaps the best example of these narrative strategies is ―The Pearl in the Oyster,‖ which Dunbar-Nelson published in The Southern Workman in August 1902.69 This short story centers on the career of Auguste Picou, a young Creole man. The first of his family to graduate ―a school,‖ Auguste is unable to find good work and unwilling to become a cigar-maker, the typical profession of his class. He marries, goes into politics, and decides to move ―uptown‖ and pass for white to succeed in politics. His wife is devastated by his decision because she wants nothing more than to be near her family. The couple has two children, and the wife is very unhappy. When rumors of his origins ruin his chance at white politics, the couple moves back home. They are rejected by old family and friends and the couple is forced to move away again. In ―The Pearl in the Oyster,‖ passing is much more complex than shifting from black to white. Auguste is Creole. In his neighborhood, Creoles do not identify as African-American or even as ―American.‖ August attends a Negro college, though his mother laments, ―My son wid what dey call Negre! Non, non!‖ (52). In her essay ―People of Color in Louisiana,‖ Dunbar- Nelson explains:

The native white Louisianan will tell you that a Creole is a white man, whose ancestors contain some French or Spanish blood in their veins…The Caucasian will shudder with horror at the idea of including a person of color in the definition, and the person of color

69 The publication date of ―The Pearl in the Oyster‖ is mistakenly listed as 1900 in The Works of Alice Dunbar- Nelson, Volume 3.

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will retort with his definition that a Creole is a native of Louisiana, in whose blood runs mixed strains of everything un-American, with the African strain slightly apparent. (138)

When Auguste and his wife move uptown, their families tearfully protest because it is ―heresy almost for a Creole to cross the dividing line of Canal Street and pass into the unknown land of America beyond.‖ In the system Dunbar-Nelson identifies in ―People of Color in Louisiana‖ and in ―The Pearl in the Oyster,‖ being ―un-American,‖ both geographically and ethnically, is a part of being Creole. So when Dunbar-Nelson writes that it is ―heresy‖ to ―pass into‖ America, she identifies a geographical move as a kind of passing. Kristina Brooks writes, ―By particularizing the streets, neighborhoods, and communities where her characters attempt to cross ethnic boundaries and are destroyed by their fixed ethnic positions, Dunbar-Nelson denaturalizes ethnicity itself by highlighting its determinants: geographical and class positions‖ (23). Brooks suggests that in Dunbar-Nelson‘s New Orleans and ‗Steenth Street fiction, a character who crosses ethnic, class, or geographical boundaries can be seen as passing. Dunbar-Nelson identifies another kind of passing even before Auguste relocates. Although Auguste‘s father was African-American and he attended an African-American college, Auguste himself is light- skinned enough to pass for white. When he returns from college, Auguste gets a job at a white billiard hall and decides not to be seen with his African-American friend Frank. ―He had suddenly become ashamed of being seen on the streets with Frank‖ and resents the Jim Crow restrictions he must obey when he‘s with Frank. In this scenario, a Creole passes first for American (when he moves to attend college), then as African-American (to attend a black college), then as white (to maintain his position at the billiard hall and to gain better social mobility), and finally as Irish (to break into uptown white politics). In this story, passing can be both positive and negative. Auguste passes in order to graduate from college (positive) but passing to succeed in politics and gain social privilege devastates his wife. While passing causes disfavor among his friends and family, it becomes a tragedy and character flaw only when it intersects with the romance plot. In this story, the romance is not focused on courtship and marriage. Autuste has known his wife-to-be his whole life, and ―by a tacit understanding between their families, it was understood that some day they would marry. It was an agreement that suited everyone concerned, and unlike most such affairs, promised to run smoothly to a happy ending‖ (56). This custom removes courtship from the romance plot. Instead, this romance plot begins just after their marriage, when Auguste moves the couple

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―uptown‖ and begins regularly to pass as white. His new wife, Laura, complies and ―by a tacit agreement, she and August never mentioned their families‖ to their new white friends (57). The decision to marry and the decision to pass are not made by Laura; she is a passive participant. Auguste tries to enter the world of nonnative Louisiana politics—American politics. When discovered by white men, he is turned away—they ―shudder with horror at the idea of including a person of color in the definition.‖ When he returns to his home neighborhood downtown to try to win an election, his Creole neighbors and friends shun him for having tried to deny his pure ―un-American‖ ancestry (in Dunbar-Nelson‘s words) while African-Americans like his old friend Jake shun him for having tried to be white. Auguste doesn‘t make it easy for his old friends to forgive him; upon his return, he ―dropped into the habit of saying ‗nigger‘ when it so pleased him‖ and continued to pass for white in mixed company or at the theater (61). Auguste is no hero; despite the forces of class, race, and a caste system working against him, what really brings him down is his greed, a sense that he alone is entitled to ―the pearl in the oyster.‖ The romance plot entails Laura giving up everything that is important to her so that her husband can pursue his dreams of political power. When they first move, ―She was lonely and unhappy‖ (57). When they return home, only to be rejected, she is left with two young children and no friends or family. Dunbar-Nelson writes, ―She was growing thin and pale, and there was a pathetic down- droop to her mouth‖ (63). In the end, she gives up everything for Auguste, suggesting they move again: ―He knew what suffering she must have undergone to have spoken those words; she, the most home-loving and conservative of women, she who hated change and new things so much‖ (64). The romance plot entails a heterosexual union in which women take charge domestically and give birth to children. In this way, this is a successful romance. However, Dunbar-Nelson makes clear that Auguste‘s passing leaves the couple unfulfilled, isolated from home by passing: through race, class (Auguste‘s education), and geography. Passing and a failed romance have broken the ties that bind Creoles to each other and to the South. While this story‘s central conflict does not revolve around gender (which becomes more common as her work begins to focus on more racial issues in the 1910s), Dunbar-Nelson does make a comment through the wife‘s actions. The young woman follows her husband meekly, with little questioning or active objection to the path he has chosen for them, despite her intense desire to remain downtown among her Creole friends and family. Dunbar-Nelson critiques passive womanhood throughout the story. The pathos she associates with young Laura is pity,

149 but it is pity for a woman who has made poor decisions, not the pity of the ―tragic mulatto‖ stereotype Dunbar-Nelson always consciously avoided in her stories. ―The Pearl in the Oyster‖ and other stories that Dunbar-Nelson published in The Southern Workman did more than just present ―local color.‖ ―The Pearl in the Oyster‖ investigates the tensions between the romance plot and passing, concluding that the two intertwine to lead to tragedy and isolation. Despite critics‘ assertions that Dunbar-Nelson‘s early work was disappointing in its lack of progressive storylines, the pieces in The Southern Workman reveal that there were a few venues willing to publish this fiction, even as it was turned down by editors at places like the Atlantic Monthly and Mercury. As the official organ of the Hampton Institute, The Southern Workman promoted African-American achievement, and Dunbar-Nelson‘s fiction found a compatible place among articles detailing the progress of African-American and Native American achievements in education, industry, business, government, and politics. Her stories do not artificially simplify interracial and class tensions, nor does The Southern Workman ignore racial prejudice, stereotypes, and hatred in the United States. After her separation from Dunbar in 1902, Dunbar-Nelson struggled to publish her work. Without Dunbar‘s literary agent, Paul Reynolds, magazine editors were less likely to accept her work. She began teaching English and Art at Howard High School in Delaware in 1902, a position she would maintain until she was fired for attending a women‘s rights rally in 1920. Finally, Dunbar-Nelson‘s work found a regular home in The Crisis, founded in November 1910 as the voice of the NAACP. The Crisis relied more heavily on national politics and causes than The Southern Workman. Named after James Russell Lowell‘s 1844 abolitionist poem ―The Present Crisis,‖ The Crisis worked to erase the ―silence‖ its editors saw under conditions of segregation and hatred. The leading editorial to the inaugural edition explained the mission of the publication:

The object of this publication is to set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people. It takes its name from the fact that the editors believe that this is a critical time in the history of the advancement of men. Catholicity and tolerance, reason and forbearance can today make the world-old dream of human brotherhood approach realization; while bigotry and prejudice, emphasized race consciousness and force can repeat the awful history of the

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contact of nations and groups in the past. We strive for this higher and broader vision of Peace and Good Will.

To accomplish its mission, the publication was first and foremost a newspaper designed to ―record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations.‖ This venue was attractive to Dunbar-Nelson, who was a journalist herself. Some of her most important and lasting work was in the field of journalism, so her journalistic style and integrity helped her find a regular home in The Crisis during a period in her career in which she published very little literature. The introductory editorial of The Crisis mentioned only briefly that it would include literature. Thus, the goal of the magazine was never primarily to promote African-American artistic achievement. Nonetheless, under Jessie Fauset‘s leadership between 1919 and 1926, Arena Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer were among the magazine‘s literary contributors. The regular content of The Crisis included litanies of African-American achievement in government, education, citizenship and the arts alongside reports of discrimination, crime and lynching against African-Americans. Full page photographs of African-American men and women regularly illustrated its pages. Despite the availability of positive stories and images of African Americans in venues such as The Crisis and The Southern Workman, only negative or demeaning images of African-Americans circulated in mainstream periodical culture. As one editorial in The Crisis lamented: ―Yet what American magazine dares paint a Negro as aught but a beast, a clown, or a silly old servant?‖ (Sept 1914, 234). At times, the ads directed toward women in The Crisis encouraged a standard of beauty that could only be achieved through exacting beauty rituals and expensive products, at times even suggesting that mixed-race or white appearances were superior. Definitions of female respectability among the black bourgeoisie often relied on light skin and features. A ―Creole‖ wig advertisement hints toward lighter, straighter hair, while the Kashmir Chemical Company promises ―clear, smooth skin—perfect hair‖ alongside a picture of a light-skinned woman labeled as ―A Kashmir Girl‖ (Dec 1917). Nonetheless, these products gave African-American women the opportunity to attend to their physical appearance without being stereotyped as overly sexual, a common stereotype of black women at the turn of the century. Typically, advertising in The Crisis, both general and geared toward African-American readers, stayed in line with the NAACP‘s vision: ―to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality

151 of minority group citizens of United States and eliminate race prejudice. The NAACP seeks to remove all barriers of racial discrimination through the democratic processes‖ (―History.‖ www.naacp.org). Ads for religious, agricultural, industrial and educational training schools, African-American colleges and Atlanta, Howard and Fisk Universities appeared each month while ads recruiting employees promised ―dignified work‖ (September 1914, 251). While The Crisis published only a few stories or poems in each issue, there were always dozens of advertisements for books by and about African Americans. Fifteen years into her publishing career, Dunbar-Nelson had become an activist, and this is reflected in her work for The Crisis, which takes up black concerns and issues more vehemently than her previous work. Her signature poem ―Violets‖ appeared in August 1917 (and was reprinted in The Southern Workman in 1920). A one-act jingoistic play ―Mine Eyes Have Seen‖ was printed in 1918, and in 1929 her poem ―The Proletariat Speaks,‖ which reveals a poet trying to modernize the style she formed at the turn of the century. ―Harlem John Henry Views the Armada‖ was printed in 1932 after the ―Negro epic of peace‖ was rejected by Bookman, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Mercury (Hull Color 81). Dunbar-Nelson‘s first publication in The Crisis, the short story ―Hope Deferred,‖ appeared in September 1914. In that same year, the Douglass Publishing Company released Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence, a collection of speeches and essays by African-Americans edited by Dunbar-Nelson under the name Alice Moore Dunbar. If readers of The Crisis weren‘t familiar with Dunbar-Nelson through her earlier publications or through her turbulent marriage to the famous Paul Lawrence Dunbar, they would have seen the full-page advertisements for Masterpieces, which appeared regularly in the magazine throughout 1914 and beyond.

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Figure 8 The Crisis Volume 8 No 1, 46

This advertisement ran frequently during 1914 and 1915, although the collection never sold well.

A picture of Dunbar-Nelson accompanies the ad, emphasizing the light-skinned, youthful appearance that was variously a curse and a blessing to the writer throughout her life. The full- page ad for Dunbar-Nelson‘s collection reads, ―If you would know of the race, appreciate the sacrifice for principle, understand the struggle for liberty, and property value, the oratorical

153 achievement of the Negro, you should place this book in your library‖ (August 1914 99). This was exactly the kind of book The Crisis was interested in promoting; in fact, Masterpieces appeared frequently in The Crisis‘s ―A Selected List of Books,‖ available for purchase through the magazine. The Crisis placed Dunbar-Nelson alongside Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Mary White Ovington, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson (Johnson was listed as ―Anonymous‖). Douglass Publishing claimed in the ad to have set aside 50,000 copies of the collection for exclusive sale to readers of The Crisis, to be paid in five monthly installments of fifty cents. So when readers came across the name ―Mrs. Paul Lawrence Dunbar‖ in the table of contents for September 1914, they likely associated it with the ―Alice Moore Dunbar‖ of the advertisement, associating ―Hope Deferred‖ with Masterpieces. The magazine cultivated this association in order to advocate Dunbar-Nelson as more than the ―local color‖ writer that her early work may have suggested to some readers. Even though the magazine each month included a call for ―manuscripts and drawings related to colored people,‖ the consistency of focus and content in The Crisis attests to a variety of available material for the magazine. If Dunbar- Nelson‘s story had in fact maintained the ―strict demarcation between race and belletristic literature‖ that Hull identifies, or if it was strictly local color work, it would not have appeared in The Crisis. ―Hope Deferred,‖ Dunbar-Nelson‘s first publication in The Crisis, follows the story of a couple, Edwards and Margaret, young enough not to have ―outgrown [their] ideals.‖ Edwards has been in search of employment as a civil engineer for over a year and had come to this city to apply at the Monarch Works, a massive undertaking in need of engineers. Turned down because an African American is not seen as ―fitted‖ to that type of work, Edwards works as a waiter and strikebreaker at a local restaurant. The man who refused to hire him visits the restaurant. Provoked by injustice and anger, Edwards fights the man and is thrown in jail; his young wife must move home to work. This story stands out in Dunbar-Nelson‘s oeuvre for its clear emphasis on racial inequality and discrimination, although its emphasis on difference and loss are consistent even with her earliest published work. Much like ―The Pearl in the Oyster,‖ the romance plot in ―Hope Deferred‖ centers on a married, heterosexual couple. The wife desires a domestic family setup, but her husband‘s career prevents it. Dunbar-Nelson knew that the audience for The Crisis was mixed-gender. And while the focus of early civil rights activities did not focus directly on issues specific to black women, she nonetheless wanted to present readers

154 with a female character who reflected their perceived values and concerns. While Margaret is not a primary character in the ―Hope Deferred,‖ Edwards‘ devotion to her and his desire to keep her from poverty motivate his actions. Dunbar-Nelson writes of her, ―the man who can find a woman willing to face poverty for her husband‘s ideals has a treasure far above rubies, and more precious than one with a thorough understanding of domestic science.‖ In the years leading up to World War I, the NAACP worked to challenge hegemonic constructions of black womanhood by presenting images of light-skinned, well-educated women on its covers and in its pages. If Dunbar-Nelson‘s portrayal of Margaret recreates submissive womanhood on one hand, it subverts The Crisis‘s privileging of a bourgeois, light-skinned ideal image of black femininity on the other. Edwards and Margaret‘s is a meager existence, despite Edwards‘ training as an engineer. Margaret is disappointed by the unfulfilled promises of the romance plot. She says to Edward timidly, ―Perhaps it would have been better if we hadn‘t married—‖ before she cuts herself off, aware of the power of her words. Black middle-class readers, the audience always most supportive of The Crisis, would have been faced with multiple potential interpretations of Margaret‘s words. African-Americans steeped in the myth of the American Dream may have read this faltering in Margaret‘s idealism as the impetus for Edwards‘ eventual downfall and imprisonment. Had she maintained her willingness to ―face poverty for her husband‘s ideals,‖ perhaps Edwards would have obtained a civil engineering position. After all, he had done everything required to gain the education for the position. This path would have allowed the couple to enter the middle class and maintain the respectable middle class values and attitudes admired by both the white and black middle class. Such an interpretation, in fact, is set up by the second line of the story, which conveys a middle- class, bourgeois gender sensibility: ―Women, in scant garments, displaying a maximum of form and minimum of taste, crept along the pavements, their mussy light frocks suggesting a futile disposition on the part of the wearers to keep cool.‖ Here, underdressed women are represented as the tasteless antithesis of the well-dressed, well-composed women on the covers of The Crisis. This opening suggests ―Mrs. Paul Lawrence Dunbar‖ has bourgeois values. However, Margaret is written sympathetically, not as an object of pity but as the representation of ―hope‖ in the title. Margaret represents the romance plot here. Edwards is fighting injustice and prejudice not to prove himself as an equal man but to protect the home promised by the romance plot.

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The placement of ―Hope Deferred‖ in the September 1914 edition of The Crisis also creates meaning, as it becomes part of the progression of the magazine from a celebration to a call to action. Advertisements for colleges and Universities, a record of African-American achievements across the nation, and ―Men of the Month‖ open the magazine. The tone is dignified, hopeful, and proud. The ―Opinion‖ section follows. In September 1914, the opinion section includes a scientific article concluding, ―The tropical African native is neither the half- child nor half-devil of popular imagination. He is at bottom a keen man of business, a trader, and an agriculturist‖ (226). It also includes a reprinted letter from a white man that makes a powerful case against racial hatred; articles on Congress, the vote, and segregation; the story of a young ten-year old African-American boy who struck it rich in oil; and a review of a few books. The tone in the Opinion segment remains relatively uplifting and positive. The Editorial and NAACP pages follow. These sections focus on discrimination, ―race antagonism,‖ civil rights, segregation, and the work of racial uplift and represent action as the solution to prejudice. A Winston Churchill essay, reprinted from the ―Christmas Century,‖ denounces claims that fighting is a poor solution to moral problems: ―The moment fighting stops, growth stops, and righteousness has ceased to radiate because it is dead‖ (235). Connecting the fight for racial freedom to the fight for national freedom, the article clearly delineates editor W.E.B. Dubois‘s position. In the magazine, this is followed by a list of the legal and political actions in progress in the branches of the NAACP. If Dunbar-Nelson‘s ―A Hope Deferred‖ warns readers that racial discrimination prevents the growth of a respectable black middle class, the articles that follow it show what can be done in the face of such prejudice. One is the story of a ―self-made‖ African American business executive living in the Philippines; the story functions as a journalistic how- to guide. Another records the achievements of the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, a group encouraging and teaching social workers for the uplift of the urban poor. In a review of John Daniels‘ 1914 ―In Freedom‘s Birthplace: A Study of Boston Negroes,‖ an editor concludes with a reminder to Crisis‘s mostly middle class bourgeois readers not to take their relative privilege for granted:

The book leaves a strong impression (an impression which the CRISIS reader must feel increasingly as he studies each month‘s issue), that … only those rights are permanent that are wrested from the race in power by the race that is oppressed. The battle for Negros‘s civil and political rights…must be fought all over again by the Negroes

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themselves when they shall awake to a realization and an understanding of the oppression under which they live. (247)

In this way, ―Hope Deferred‖ appears as a part of the magazine‘s purposeful trajectory, which moves from achievement to struggles to action. ―Hope Deferred‖ appears in the urgent, less congratulatory section of the magazine. Due to the story‘s juxtaposition with the editorial and NAACP columns of the magazine, the main characters (Edwards and Margaret) are represented as victims of segregation and racial hatred, rather than as slackers ―unfitted‖ for a middle-class black bourgeois life. As a victim of racial hatred, Edwards‘ fight with a white customer near the end of the story reads as progressive action rather than a departure from proper middle class decorum. Indeed, the story clearly relies on discrimination to drive the plot. When Edwards applies for the strikebreaking waiter‘s position, the ―foreign‖ proprietor asks, ―Of course I want waiters, but do I want colored waiters?‖ Still, he interviews him. When Edwards claims to be a civil engineer the proprietor balks. The Monarch works needs ―every engineer this side o‘ hell,‖ as the proprietor puts it before realizing that an African American would never be hired for such a position. Edwards has done what he should—he has climbed the class ladder by seeking an education that suits him for a respectable job in high demand. However, Edwards is forced to ―pass‖ as working class despite his education. He ―passes‖ as a strikebreaking waiter, but the head of the Monarch Works though he was ―passing‖ as an engineer. The ―color line‖ is more than just a trope; it is a barrier to economic achievement for African Americans. The case is concluded when Mr. Hanan (the man who refused to hire Edwards) visits the restaurant one day. While Edwards takes his order, striking workers outside yell, ―Yah! Yah! Old Adams hires niggers! Hires niggers!‖ Mr. Hanan looks up for the first time, noticing the waiter is black and says, ―Why that is so‖ (241). The invisibility Edwards felt at the original job interview is made literal in this passage. The white executive does not choose to see the black man who serves him. Once the man recognizes his waiter, Edwards feels a surge of ―hurt pride.‖ The executive continues, ―I should think, too, that this is work for which you would be more fitted than engineering‖ (241). At that moment, a protester hurls a rock through the window, knocking Edwards‘ tray into Mr. Hanan‘s lap and the man yells, ―you‘re not even a good waiter, much less an engineer!‖ The story continues, And then something snapped in the darker man‘s head. The long strain of the fruitless summer…the heat, and the task of enduring what was to him the humiliation of serving,

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and this last injustice, all culminated in a blinding flash in the brain. Reason, intelligence, all was obscured, save a man hatred and a desire to wreak his wrongs on the man, who, for the time being represented the author of them. (241) Edwards strikes Mr. Hanan and is thrown in jail. Margaret visits him and they resolve to ―defer‖ their hopes and ideals, but not to give up on them. Margaret leaves to find work. The ―hope‖ that has now been repeatedly deferred is the hope that Edwards‘ ambition, virtue, talent, and hard work will ―pay off‖ in the form of a position as a civil engineer. Just as The Crisis advertised ―dignified‖ employment to subscription agents, African American colleges and Universities encouraged young men to train for a trade, such as engineering, in order to obtain dignified employment. Forced to pass as a waiter was a form of humiliation for Edwards. ―Dignified‖ professional employment was often the ticket to the black middle class. Often this meant working in an African-American business, living in a single family home in a suburban or urban African-American neighborhood, raising a family, and living life without the daily humiliation and degradation often suffered by lower or working class African Americans. As ―A Hope Deferred‖ unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the conflict does not center on Margaret‘s failure to live up to definitions of middle class black womanhood, or on Edwards‘ failure to support his wife. Instead, the same brand of racial discrimination delineated in the editorial and NAACP sections of the magazine preceding the story force the plot to its eventual crisis. The psychological drama of ―a blinding flash‖ leading to a violent ―man hatred‖ represented fictionally what could often not be expressed journalistically even in The Crisis for fear of feeding into white hatred and stereotypes. Despite the magazine‘s goals of revealing racial prejudice where it existed, its heading read ―a record of the darker races.‖ In order to promote the positive images of African Americans missing from the white periodical and popular press, there was little ―record‖ of the psychological and physical reactions of African Americans pushed too far. ―A Hope Deferred‖ thus served as a warning to African Americans. A January 1914 editorial concluded with the following warning: ―Join the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE or be strangled to a slow and awful death by growing prejudice.‖ Edwards‘ young idealism and his youthful hope is being slowly strangled, and while the protagonists remain cautiously optimistic, readers anticipate only an eventual ―awful death‖ of hope. The African American middle class, the magazine claims, (and Dunbar- Nelson‘s short story reinforces) must fight, but they must choose their battles wisely to avoid the

158 outcomes delineated in ―A Hope Deferred.‖ Instead of the physical confrontation that ended so badly for Edwards and Margaret, editors encouraged readers to achieve an ―understanding of the oppression under which they live‖ by joining their local NAACP chapter, by reading The Crisis, and by purchasing books such as Dunbar-Nelson‘s Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence. Dunbar-Nelson‘s publication in popular and African-American magazines at the turn of the century was a remarkable achievement for any female author, especially the divorced daughter of a former slave. Appearing in The Smart Set and Good Housekeeping in those early years, Dunbar-Nelson‘s short fiction served to challenge hegemonic constructions of race, class, and gender in the mainstream periodical marketplace. Conflating the romance and passing plots, Dunbar-Nelson negotiates a place for her all of her complex characters and allows her to construct an authorial identity in the press that respected both her sales and her ideas. Her work in the African-American press, which is much more explicitly about race, reveals a white marketplace unwilling to publish ―realistic‖ portrayals of African-American life. Despite critics‘ evaluations of Dunbar-Nelson‘s early work as juvenile in comparison to her later journalism, careful readings of her work in the context of the magazines in which they were published provide insight into the strategies of negotiation (understatement, symbolism, reversal) necessitated by the racist, sexist periodical culture of turn-of-the-century America.

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