Imitations of Life: Fannie Hurst’s Gaslight Sonatas

2. Recognition and Acclaim: Gaslight Sonatas

t2 . RECOGNITION AND ACCLAIM: GASLIGHT SONATAS Women have taken their place in the world's work and ask no man's leave to declare their economic independence; but in life's fundamental they wait, nor dare show that they care to do otherwise, as they have waited all through the ages. Is there a remedy?-"How Can an Unasked Girl Marry?" Good Housekeeping, September 1913 There is a better word than "home:' and that word is "Mother:' Without Mother, home lacks a heart or perhaps a soul.-Advertisement for Kathleen Norris, "Home to Mother;' Good Housekeeping, August 1919 "ROLLING STOCK" F rom the earliest steps in her writing career, Fannie Hurst manifested a creative intuition perfectly attuned to the sensibilities of her time. Coming along in the Progressive Era, when the "lady of the decoration" was in vogue, surrounded by a fanciful, sentimental ethos, the attentive author herself experienced the public's attraction to the accouterments of romance, whose engaging personal dramas were reported as news in the most reputable of dailies. As the second decade of the twentieth century began, one could have had a difficult time distinguishing between the materials of romantic fiction and hard news headlines in the New York Times: LOVE AND HANDCUFFS; ROMANCE OF THE SEA A NARRATIVE OF THE HEART; TROUBLES OF THE NEW STEWARDESS ON THE LINER CARONIA SHE HASN'T A HUSBAND YET SO THE YOUTHFUL STEWARD WHO THREATENED SUICIDE AND MURDER HAS MADE IT UP AND THERE'S A WEDDING TO COMEt 34 RECOGNITION AND ACCLAIM Hardly could a day go by without such prom.inent human interest tales of true life, whose plots Hurst would eventually appropriate, manipulate , alter, and on whose themes she would improvise: HEIRESS AND WAITER AlmESTED IN CHICAGO SECRETLY MARRIES HER OWN CHAUFFEUR BIG CRUSH TO SEE GIRL AND WAITER2 All through Fannie Hurst's impressionable and research-filled days reading the papers and roaming the neighborhoods she was vividly and rapidly put in quick touch with such real-life materials, often jumping at her fi-om romantically inclined headlines begging for tional development: ELOPING BRIDEGROOM MUST GO PENNILESS NOT ONE CENT FROM ME WHILE HE STAYS WITH WIFE ... MAY RETURN, BUT ALONE3 The published supply of source material, complemented by Hurst's own meandering about ethnic conclaves, department stores, and fast lunchroOlus, was not lost on the young writer whose typewriter swiftly converted human interest stories of the day into fiction of the time: HOTEL MAN STOPS A BUDDING ROMANCE ALL PLANS MADE FOR A SECRET WEDDING WHEN HE THREATENED TO TELL FATHER AND SHE WAS ABOUT TO SAIL FOR A CONVENT SCHOOL TO BE GONE FIVE YEARS DIDN'T SAIL A BRIDE4 Indeed, with her focus directed on the young woman-protagonist-inthe -city, Fannie Hurst noted the similar, successful emphasis applied by pop-writer Reginald Wright Kauffman when in 1912 he brought out The Girl That Goes Wrol1g, a text eXaIuining SOlue of the social conditions behind those human drarnas of the girl that wanted the girl that studied art, the girl that is Hohelnjan, the girl that wasn't 35 RECOGNITION AND ACCLAIM told, and the girl that was weak. Hurst would appropriate some of these types and would frequently emphasize the girl that is hungry. Nor did the state and thrust of popular-selling .hardback fiction published in I9I2 escape the notice of Fannie Hurst, who was just breaking into print on a significant scale. The large displays of advertising went to the likes of Robert W Chalubets, who published two novels that year, both illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson, and one, The Streets ifAscalon, containing fifty-seven pages of Gibson pictures, was noted as a narrative "where wealth and poverty clasp hands ... [a tale of] a young widow and one of society'ssatellites:,j Another frothy novel of a woman's quest for love, The Melting ifMolly by one Maria Thompson Daviess, was promoted by a campaign that featured doggerel: The more that Molly melts her weight The more the lovers wooIn the process of the melting Her heart is melted too.6 The escapist aura of Graustarkian romance still hovered prominently over the fictional scene, Willa Cather's first extended effort Alexander:s Bridge attracting nowhere near the attention devoted to rose-scented sentiment: "Ifyou 'like peaches'you'11 Just love' Molly and her story:'7 Serious authors called into question the contemporary emphasis on the literary...