The Pacific Northwest (Re)Writes New England: Civic Myth and Women's Literary Regionalism in Ella Higginson's Revision ofThe Scarlet Letter

Abstract

Don't you see that we can never escape the results of a sin? We have to bear and suffer them always. (Ella Higginson, Marietta of Out-West) (1) When we scan a list of U.S. authors who were asked to contribute to a collection of written tributes honoring the 1904 centenary of Nathaniel Hawthorne's birth, it is perhaps unsurprising to see names of women closely identified with New England such as, for example, Katharine Lee Bates, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and M. Alphonsa Lathrop (Rose Hawthorne Lathrop). (2) However, we might not necessarily anticipate that such a list would include a female author from what was then the far Pacific Northwest. (3) Indeed, that Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson (1862?-1940) was invited to pay written homage to Hawthorne may inform our impressions regarding both U.S. literary regionalism and Hawthorne's literary influence. Later in this essay I will turn to the Hawthorne tribute that Higginson wrote, but I wish to begin my discussion by focusing our attention on the role that Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter played in Higginson's writing. In her early twentieth-century novel Marietta of Out-West (1902), Higginson revisited and recast the later life of the adulterous woman that had been scripted half a century earlier by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (1850). In this essay I break new ground by uncovering this previously unrecognized rewriting and by arguing for a pivotal relationship between The Scarlet Letter and Pacific Northwest women's literary regionalism. I maintain that Higginson's deliberate turn to The Scarlet Letter--that eminent U.S. novel set in the New England region-fundamentally guided her endeavor to determine how, in contrast, the Pacific Northwest region might function in a U.S. novel beyond employment as a geographic setting. Higginson's use of The Scarlet Letter also enabled her more precisely to recognize and to characterize Pacific Northwest white women. (4) The analysis that follows consists of three parts. I first acquaint readers with Higginson, Pacific Northwest literary regionalism, and Mariella. I next detail and analyze Higginson's literary response in Mariella to The Scarlet Letter through the lens of civic myth. I conclude with the implications of Higginson's revision of Hawthorne and Higginson's later return to The Scarlet Letter for the centennial of Hawthorne's birth. I Ella Higginson was an award-winning U.S. author of literary regional writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (5) She was, as Nina Baym recently noted, the best-known Pacific Northwest woman writer of her (284), extensively praised nationally and internationally for the quality of her writing. Higginson primarily wrote poetry and short fiction, but also newspaper columns, nonfiction, a novel, and screenplays. Her writing employed a range of tones--dramatic, humorous, and ironic. Her primary publisher was Macmillan, though she also had several books published by small Pacific Northwest presses. (6) In her day Higginson and her writing attracted international literary attention to the Pacific Northwest region. However, by the time she died in 1940 both she and her work were almost completely forgotten. Despite extensive recovery of US women's writing in recent decades, they remain virtually forgotten today. As Baym's comment indicates, a quality that particularly distinguished Higginson's writing during her lifetime was her locating her work in the Pacific Northwest. The majority of Higginson's writings are set in the states of Oregon and Washington, with infrequent forays into Alaska, British Columbia, and Idaho. (7) During this time, the Pacific Northwest region was thinly populated, remote, and largely male, a place in which white women were more readily granted enfranchisement and about which Eastern readers manifested keen curiosity. (8) This region became the fundamental public marker of Higginson's literary identity as well as one of her principal literary devices. …