Melodramatist of the Middle Border: Hamlin Garland's Early Work Reconsidered

Abstract

Melodramatist of the Middle Border:Hamlin Garland's Early Work Reconsidered Keith Newlin Keith Newlin University of North Carolina—Wilmington Notes 1. "Why Hamlin Garland Finds Wider Fields in the Drama Than in the Writing of Novels," New York Times (April 11, 1909), sec. v, p. 4. Miller of Boscobel was staged by the Donald Robertson Players in two tryouts in Madison and Appleton, Wisconsin, on January 29 and 30, and then in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago on February 3. 2. Garland published only one of these plays, the single-tax melodrama Under the Wheel (The Arena, 2 [1890], 182-228), subsequently revised as the novel Jason Edwards (1892). The remainder of his plays exist in various stages of completion in the Hamlin Garland Collection, Doheny Library, University of Southern California. 3. Mark William Rocha, "The Feminization of Failure in American Historiography: The Case of the Invisible Drama in the Life of Hamlin Garland," diss. University of Southern California, 1988, p. 6. 4. Donald Pizer, Introduction to Main-Travelled Roads (Columbus: Merrill, 1970), p. xiii. Subsequent citations will appear in the text as MTR. 5. Thomas A. Bledsoe, Introduction to Main-Travelled Roads (1954); repr. in The Critical Reception of Hamlin Garland, 1891-1978, ed. Charles L. P. Silet, Robert E. Welch, and Richard Boudreau (Troy: Whitston, 1985), p. 190. 6. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. xi. 7. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917; repr. New York: Colliers, 1917), pp. 343-44. 8. Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings (New York: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 39-40. 9. Garland's autograph manuscript of this lecture is extant in the Hamlin Garland Collection, Doheny Library, University of Southern California. Lloyd Arvidson has compiled and published a guide to the collection, Hamlin Garland: Centennial Tributes and a Checklist of the Hamlin Garland Papers in the University of Southern California Library, USC Library Bulletin no. 9 (Los Angeles: Univ. of Southern California Press, 1962). Subsequent citations to unpublished letters, notebooks, and manuscripts in this collection will appear in the text with Arvidson's citation numbers. I am grateful to the University of Southern California for permission to quote from Garland's papers. "Edwin Booth as a Master of Expression" (#584a) has recently been edited and made available in Mark Rocha's dissertation. Part One of Rocha's study summarizes and comments briefly upon all of Garland's play manuscripts; Part Two is a selected edition of Garland's dramatic criticism and the text of Rip Van Winkle. Subsequent citations to the Booth lecture are to Rocha's edition and will appear in the text. 10. Garland, A Son, p. 307. Garland's extensive notes on Taine fill two notebooks, dated 1884 (#11) and 1884-85 (#12). 11. Garland, A Son, pp. 306-7. 12. Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, Vol. 1, trans. H. van Laun (Philadelphia: David McKay, n.d.), p. 19. 13. Taine, p. 23. 14. Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garland's Early Work and Career (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960), p. 9. 15. The manuscript of Love or the Law was typed with the uppercase typewriter Garland used 1886-1888. I have not preserved the idiosyncrasies of Garland's typewriter in my transcriptions. Garland was also inconsistent in the conventions of underlining staging cues, enclosing dialogue within quotation marks, and placing periods and commas within quotation marks. I have therefore regularized my transcriptions but have not corrected his punctuation, spelling, and use (and disuse) of the apostrophe. 16. Garland later expanded this scene into "The Huskin'," the first of a series of sketches entitled "Boy Life on the Prairie," and published in the American Magazine, 7 (Jan. 1888), 299-303. Garland then reworked this sketch into chapter 16, "The Corn Husking," of Boy Life on the Prairie (1899). 17. Garland was apparently quite serious about becoming an actor and proposed a collaboration with James Whitcomb Riley in which Garland would act the lead: "How would it do for you and I to write a play? Did I speak of this before? I have a good plan of a new one. 'The McTurgs...