Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing

5. Colorful Writing in the Era of Yellow Journalism

5 / Colorful Writing in the Era of Yellow Journalism In 1889, the New York World reported that it was sending Nellie Bly, “girl reporter,” around the world to see if she could beat the fictional record in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days.1 Completing the circumnavigation of the globe in a mere seventy two days, Bly beat the record and returned to New York a celebrity, publishing her account in the World and subsequently in book form as Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days. Her unusual combination of plucky, feminine style and physical daring earned her fame and skyrocketed the circulation of the New York World.2 The regular appearance of Bly’s byline on the front page of a major metropolitan daily signaled women’s new presence in mainstream journalism . By the late nineteenth century, women were increasingly joining newspaper staffs, appearing on mastheads, and gaining access to newsrooms that were previously off-limits to them. As Alice Fahs notes, “The extraordinary expansion of the great metropolitan papers in the late 1880s and 1890s meant that the pressing demands of commerce—the need the fill newspapers with lively material on a daily basis—outweighed even the most conservative editors’ staunch belief that women should stay in the private sphere.”3 Still, most editors generally deemed women too susceptible to emotion to perform traditional reportage; indeed, they were seen as intellectually ill equipped to achieve an objective stance. Responding to such characterizations of women, Thomas Wentworth Higginson published an essay on the subject of women and emotion, asking, “Is there any reason to suppose that in any serious matter, where colorful writing in the era of yellow journalism / 111 women have grown accustomed to working side by side with men, they have proved to be in the long-run too emotional?”4 Higginson was in the minority in his advocacy of professional women, and as the field of journalism evolved, an emphasis on hard-nosed reportage and masculine grit consigned most female journalists to the society pages and other specialized realms. Flouting the expectation that female journalists should concern themselves only with women’s issues, Bly found ingenious ways of gaining success as an investigative reporter, pioneering what came to be known as “stunt reporting.” More than just a reporter, she transformed herself into a news item, making her body and identity available to the scrutiny and speculation of the news industry.5 Noting her defiance of convention and her physical bravery, feminist scholars have hailed Bly as a heroine. However, her success in the pages of the World is hardly as groundbreaking as it might seem when considered in light of the history of journalism that this book has charted.6 Since the 1830s, mainstream journalism has exploited the profitability of white women’s bodies, devoting pages to stories of murdered, scandalized, or otherwise compromised women. Bly’s method of stunt reporting taps directly into this tradition. With titles such as “Nellie Bly as a White Slave,” “Trying to Be a Servant,” “Nellie Bly as a Salvation Army Girl,” and “Learning Ballet Dancing: Nellie Bly in Short Gauze Skirts Kicks at a Mark,” her articles in the World regularly play up her wholesome looks and relatable appeal as well as her sexuality and vulnerability. Most of her articles include illustrations of her in form-fitting dresses and well-coiffed hair. While Bly was often motivated by a desire to ameliorate conditions for women, her representational practices satiated a mass market long primed to devour descriptions of young white women in precarious situations. Thus, while Bly’s career represents a new horizon of professional possibilities for women, it also demonstrates the limitations and costs of such participation . Her success was wholly dependent on gratifying readers and editors who eagerly embraced the excessive attention she gave to her body and femininity; these were the conditions that made her work as a journalist possible. In one of Bly’s most famous stunts, she had herself committed to Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum in New York to report on the conditions of women deemed insane. In order to get admitted to the asylum, she checked into a home for women under an assumed name and began acting insane. Even before Bly entered the asylum, the print media was profiting from her public performance. The New York Sun ran an article 112...