"Wayward and Untrained Years":Reforming the "Wayward Girl" in The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Jennie Gerhardt Emily Hainze (bio) In W. E. B. Du Bois's 1911 novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Zora, the novel's heroine, is introduced in the opening pages as she runs through a southern swamp at night, an "elf-girl," "black, and lithe, and tall, and willowy," whose mystical "poetry of motion" and "formless, boundless music" puzzles an onlooker.1 This onlooker has stumbled into the swamp and attempts to identify Zora's "formless" figure and to calculate her age and relationship to the unnamed landscape. The "wild whirl" of Zora's liminal girlish figure, its idealized feminine form recognizable but also made nebulous and strange, poses a question for the reader: what will her "wild running through the dark" come to represent in the novel (7)? Zora's flight beyond the home and through the outdoors suggests a girlhood infused with an unsettling power not yet made legible: the quest to understand Zora's wayward trajectory structures the remainder of the novel. At the start of Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt, also published in 1911, the reader meets Jennie, the novel's German immigrant heroine, at work in the city hotel in Columbus, Ohio, far from The Quest of the Silver Fleece's Alabama landscape. Moving through her mundane domestic labor, Jennie appears similarly malleable: "This daughter of poverty, who was now to fetch and carry the laundry of this distinguished citizen of Columbus, was a creature of mellowness which words can but vaguely suggest. … Nature's fine curves and shadows touched her as a song itself."2 Jennie's girlhood is also indistinct and suggestive like Zora's: linear development is displaced by nature's "curves and shadows." The boundaries of the home also blur as Jennie seeks the outdoors: "When the days were fair, she looked out of her kitchen window and longed to go where the [End Page 341] meadows were. … [S]he delighted to wonder at the pattern of it, to walk where it was most golden, and follow with instinctive appreciation the holy corridors of the trees" (16). Like the representational mystery that opens The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dreiser's novel puzzles over the question of who will capture "the spirit of Jennie," imbuing Jennie's "girlish simplicity" with expressive potential and power (16). This essay pairs Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and examines how both these 1911 novels take up the question of young women's "waywardness," or departure from traditional domestic mores. The heightened alarm over the "wayward girl" emerged in the 1910s as immigration, migration, and urbanization transformed the United States, and Progressive Era reform campaigns around prostitution and social "vice"—intended to police unconventional social and sexual relationships in the modernizing social order—reached full tilt. I suggest that Dreiser and Du Bois embrace and exploit the possibilities for social transformation inherent in the period's moral panic over the working-class adolescent girl's "incorrigibility," reframing the uncertain trajectory and liminal position of the wayward girl in modernizing American society as an opportunity to radically reimagine newly modern social life in the second decade of the twentieth century. This reimagination hinged on the emergence of the wayward girl's adolescence as a new and nebulous category of age and development in the 1910s. Critics have often highlighted the figures of the prewar "new woman," who newly entered public life, and the postwar "modern girl," who partook in youth culture's consumption and sexual rebellion, noting that their continuum and overlap reveal the genesis of the sexualized teenager, as the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group observes.3 However, the working-class adolescent figure of the wayward girl, who emerged as a figure of social panic and policing in the 1910s prior to the explicitly modern "sexual revolution" of the 1920s and the reign of the middle-class teen flapper, is regularly overlooked in genealogies of adolescent girlhood.4 The wayward girl's malleable "formless and boundless" figuration blended conventional understandings of childhood's innocent impressionability with fears about...