Sincerity, Secrecy, and Lies: Helen Hunt Jackson's No Name Novels

Abstract

Sincerity, Secrecy, and Lies:Helen Hunt Jackson's No Name Novels Carol E. Schmudde Carol E. Schmudde Eastern Illinois University Notes 1. Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982), p. 93. 2. The letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich in which Jackson expressed this intention is cited by many of her biographers and critics, but it is perhaps best examined in the context of Valerie Sherer Mathes' Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), p. 77, which gives a thorough and balanced analysis of the positive and negative effects of Jackson's efforts on behalf of Native Americans. 3. See Ruth Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson (New York: D. Appleton Century, 1939), pp. 151-3; Antoinette May, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Lonely Voice of Conscience (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1987), pp. 57-60; and Rosemary Whitaker, Helen Hunt Jackson (Boise, Idaho: Boise State Univ. Press, 1987), p. 24. 4. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Contemporaries (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), pp. 156-7, and Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989), p. 95. 5. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 287. 6. Quoted in Higginson, p. 155. 7. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 56-57. 8. Halttunen, p. 57. 9. Mercy Philbrick's Choice (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876), p. 64. Subsequent references to this work (as MCP) will be in the text. 10. Hetty's Strange History (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877), p. 47. Subsequent references to this work (as HSH) will be in the text. 11. Halttunen, p. 193. 12. Halttunen, p. 6. 13. Halttunen, pp. 34, xv. 14. Sisela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 32. See especially Chapter 2, "Truthfulness, Deceit, and Trust." 15. Lying, p. 80. 16. Sisela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 13. 17. Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part I, Ms. 0020, Bx 6, Fd 14, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado. This folder contains clippings of reviews of Mercy Philbrick's Choice and Hetty's Strange History. Subsequent references to nineteenth-century reviews of these novels are from this source. Permission to quote from the Helen Hunt Jackson papers has been granted by Tutt library. 18. Bok, Lying, p. 88. 19. Jackson's friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote that her authorship of the No Name novels "was no secret" at the time of her death (Contemporaries, p. 161). According to Ruth Odell, Jackson told her friend Moncure Daniel Conway that she wanted the truth about Saxe Holm known only after her death (Odell, p. 136). Her publishers brought out her posthumous publications, including Zeph and Between Whiles, both of which had been intended as Saxe Holm works, under the name Helen Jackson (H. H.). 20. Kelley, p. 125. 21. Quoted in Odell, pp. 65. 22. Susan Coultrap-McQuin's Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990) contains an entire chapter on Jackson which explores in detail Jackson's motives for pseudonymity and anonymity, and their effect on her sales and reputation. See especially pages 158-64. Also helpful is Ruth Friend's summary of the Saxe Holm controversy in Helen Hunt Jackson: A Critical Study, unpublished dissertation, Kent State University, 1985, pp. 183-88. 23. Friend, pp. 184-85. 24. Odell, p. 148. 25. Anna Mary Wells, Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), pp. 201-11, and Antoinette May, pp. 28-29. 26. Friend, p. 201. For an assessment of the various attributions that have been made about the novel, see pages 201-05. 27. George Whicher, This Was A Poet (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 128. 28. Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), p. 46. 29. "H. H." [Helen Hunt Jackson...