Around 1913: Progressivism, Politics, and Play

When viewed through the lens of its most canonical literary texts, the Progressive Era was one of stifled female agency, the com-modification of women, and marriages that were, in the most generous of terms, unsatisfying. Lily Bart succumbs to death from chloral as the heartless climbers around her advance themselves through marriage; Trina McTeague dies at her husband’s violent hands; and Edna Pontellier’s efforts to claim sexual, artistic, and personal freedom end in suicide. Before the advent of Progressivism, Henry James and William Dean Howells may well be deemed architects of the bad literary marriage: in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Isabel Archer, suffocated by her marriage to Gilbert Osmond, suffers a death in life; A Modern Instance (1882) represents the unraveling marriage and acrimonious divorce of Bartley and Marcia Hubbard. Successful heroines navigate a system that would render them voiceless, and their success is highly qualified: as Carrie Meeber rocks back and forth in her chair, having attained triumph on the stage, Undine Spragg, of The Custom of the Country (1913), ponders the role of ambassadress, which due to her multiple divorces, she will never have the social prestige to play. If the most canonical works of the period—especially those taught most frequently in the undergraduate classroom—are known for their somber portrayal of marital and male-female relations, such critics as Rachel Bowlby and Walter Benn Michaels famously recast our understanding of the period in relation to the gendered economics of consumption and production, generating equally bleak results. Works fusing feminist and Marxist scholarship with an examination of psychological discourses of the period, like Jennifer Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion, Modernity (2004), are similarly pessimistic, analyzing a “stuckness,” in Fleissner’s terms, that characterizes female subjectivity of the period, symbolized in Carrie’s restless, yet undirected motion (x). Given the world view of these fictions, it is no wonder that undergraduate literature students often dismiss the period as depressing or that fast-paced survey courses move through the period quickly as part of a teleological narrative leading toward modernity.

Clare Eby’s Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era and Mary Chapman’s Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism provocatively recast the period in several distinct ways. They move to the foreground a different kind of gender politics than the one Marxist feminism (woman as commodity) emblematizes, by focusing on feminist and Progressive challenges to traditional marriage (Eby), and suffrage as a movement that produced a distinct textual culture (Chapman). Secondly, they move away from canonical narratives of realism and naturalism, identifying a protomodern literary culture that anticipates but is not yet modernism. Thirdly, they reopen the archive, turning our attention not only to underrepresented authors and texts, but also to underappreciated narrative strategies and genres, and typographical, performative, and stylistic experimentation. The result is a more richly nuanced account of the period that complicates clichés and deepens our critical understanding of the era. Placed in dialogue, both works emphasize the importance of conversation—between men and women, between suffragists and “antis,” and between women united by the shared desire for social change. While marriage and suffrage were serious business, a spirit of play animates both studies. In Eby’s terms, couples use marriage as a “laboratory, experiment, and creative process” (12); in Chapman’s, suffragists experiment with new tools for personal and political liberation—in offices and streets, in newspapers and novels, on the page and the stage. The Progressive period, viewed through the works of these two authors, regains its forward motion. Both works, then, call our attention to this period of experiments in living, experiments that necessitate new narrative strategies and a revised cast of characters. If the nineteenth-century heroine’s text was a narrative driven by marital requirements, Eby prompts us to consider: what if “Reader, I married him,” was the beginning of the story, rather...