Ella Rhoads Higginson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Pacific Northwest Women's Literary Regionalism

Abstract

In her 1899 short story, Stubbornness of Uriah Slater, Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson ([1862]-1940) resituates and rewrites Mary E. Freeman's well-known story Revolt of (1890). (1) In so doing, Higginson establishes pivotal association between Pacific Northwest women's literary regionalism and postbellum New England women's literary regionalism. (2) Rewriting Revolt of 'Mother' enables Higginson to activate cross-regionalist literary conversation regarding the social and material conditions of US white women. Higginson employs the New England of Revolt of 'Mother as recognized literary regional norm against which to delineate more precisely how, in contrast, the Pacific Northwest region might function culturally, politically, and nationally (Kollin 414). (3) Stubbornness of Uriah Slater is important because it prompts critical re-view of late-nineteenth-century US women's regionalism in its resolute appending of the Pacific Northwest to other literary regions of the nation and its corresponding interruption of the dominance of New England in women's literary regionalism. (4) The Pacific Northwest remains, as Susan Kollin writes, largely undertheo-rized in studies of American literary history (414). (5) Among the valuable exceptions to this surprising neglect is, for example, John Cleman's examination of the relative obscurity of the Oregon poet and novelist H. L. Davis. Cleman contends that lack of critical or popular interest in Davis and his work is a sign of the [Pacific Northwest] region's defining marginality (431). For Cleman, a major (or canonical) distinctly regionalist work of Pacific Northwest fiction--comparable to Country of the Pointed Firs, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, My Antonia, or The Sound and the Fury--has yet to appear (448). Kollin resists such emphasis on regionalist major works as unduly restrictive and exclusionist. She argues that allowing concerns about canonicity and literary value to dominate debates about regionalism ... literary critics end up narrowing the scope of their study, overlooking other issues that deserve scholarly attention (413). Ko important discussion draws on writings by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest writers Sherman Mexie, Timothy Egan, Ken Kesey, and Marilynne Robinson. My essay builds on work regarding Pacific Northwest literary regionalism by scholars such as Cleman and Kollin. However, mine is the first to focus inquiry on an earlier Pacific Northwest literary regionalist text--that is, writing from the turn into the twentieth century--and deliberately to foreground the writing of significant, forgotten Pacific Northwest woman author. Reviewers often referenced Wilkins's fiction when discussing Higginson's: review of Mariella in the Buffalo Express, for instance, opined that Nile character work in it is equal to Miss Wilkins's best. (6) A review of Higginson's poetry collection When the Birds Go North Again in the Los Angeles Herald similarly commented, It has often been said of [Higginsonl that she has portrayed the life of the Pacific Slope with skill and artistic feeling which gives her for the West the position that Miss has achieved for the New England States (22). However, reviewers were also quick to note that Higginson's fiction transcended such similarities. For example: It would seem from these stories as if new Mary E. may have arisen to bring Puget Sound within the literary horizon. There is no trace of imitation. On the contrary, the sketches are notably new work, notwithstanding marked general resemblance to the earlier stories of Miss Wilkins (Rev. of The Flower). This quotation and others like it indicate reviewers' identification of both the originality of Higginson's fiction and its resonances with Wilkins's. In particular, the lives and behaviors of Higginson's fictive regional white women differ instructively from Wilkins's. …