The Power and the Glory: A Novel of Appalachia, and: The Crux, and: That Affair Next Door and Lost Man's Lane, and: Other Things Being Equal, and: "A Half Caste" and Other Writings (review)

Abstract

The Power and the Glory: A Novel of Appalachia. By Grace MacGowan Cooke. Edited by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. 373 pp. $18.95 paper. The Crux. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Jennifer S. Tuttle. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. 242 pp. $42.50. The Crux. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Dana Seitler. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 171 pp. $49.95/$16.95 paper. That Affair Next Door and Lost Man's Lane. By Anna Katherine Green. Edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 445 pp. $74.95/$21.95 paper. Other Things Being Equal. By Emma Wolf. Edited by Barbara Cantalupo. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. 274 pp. $18.95 paper. "A Half Caste" and Other Writings. By Onoto Watanna. Edited by Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 180 pp. $34.95/$16.95 paper. In a time of compressed budgets for both universities and university presses, we must consider ourselves fortunate to have access to a number of recently reprinted texts written by American women authors. The commitment of scholars and presses to the process of recovery and the publication of scholarly editions is crucial to the continued survival and expansion of our field. Recovery work allows us—indeed, forces us—continually to reevaluate the field of American women's writing as we know it, rethinking our own canonization of particular authors, methods of periodization, and aesthetic and political standards of judgment. In this review, I focus on the reprinting of fiction originally written and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The names of some of these writers will be easily recognizable, while others—and their work—will come as a satisfying and even delightful surprise. Each one of these texts facilitates the developing dialogue regarding American women writers' use of popular genres and publishing venues during this period. The most intriguing of these recent reprints is Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt's edition of Grace MacGowan Cooke's The Power and the Glory: A Novel of Appalachia (1910). The novel itself is a wonderful read, but just as important, it expands our understanding of the intersections of feminist, environmental, and Appalachian studies. The Power and the Glory features the fiercely independent heroine, Johnnie Consadine, a mountain girl who moves to a factory town in order to earn money to support her family. Cooke's discussion of women and work is complicated, however, in that she acknowledges the benefits of labor for women as well as the damaging effects of both domestic work and mill work on women's health and ambition. Using a range of female characters, Cooke demonstrates how difficult it is for women—especially poor women—to find meaningful work in a patriarchal, class-conscious society. [End Page 91] Cooke also deplores the exploitation of both the physical environment of the mountains and the Appalachian people, ultimately imagining a utopian community in which mill owners and laborers can work together to improve living and work conditions. A prolific and talented writer, Cooke has virtually disappeared from literary view; according to Engelhardt, her work has been, for the most part, out of print for seventy years. Engelhardt's introduction deftly repositions Cooke within the many cultures, communities, and literary movements wherein she lived and wrote. The introduction also addresses the novel's importance, both in its time and our own; Engelhardt writes, "By making her story of industrialization and changing social roles an Appalachian one, Cooke raised questions that were largely unvoiced in other literature of the time" and, I would add, in much of our own scholarship (ix). In The Crux (1911), Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagines a domesticated western frontier in which opportunities for young women—both for fulfilling work and for romance&#x02014...