Troping in Zitkala-Sa's Autobiographical Writings, 1900-1921

ROUMIANA VELIKOVA Troping in Zitkala-Sa's Autobiographical Writings, ? 900-1 92 ? The number of texts constituting Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical writings remains an essential issue primarily due to the peculiar history of their publication and critical reception. It is important to trace this history because assessments of Zitkala-Sa's artistic integrity have been often based on the perception that her autobiography is formally incomplete. In January 1900, the Atlantic Monthly printed "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," an autobiographical essay by the then twenty-four-year-old Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) to be followed by "The School Days of an Indian Girl," and "An Indian Teacher Among Indians" in February and March of the same year.1 Later, in December 1902, "Why I Am a Pagan" also appeared on the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. Zitkala-Sa then opened her 1921 collection of short writings American Indian Stories with the four autobiographical essays, arranged in the order in which they were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, only "Why I Am a Pagan" featured a new ending and a new title, "The Great Spirit."2 The two years intervening between the initial publication of the first three essays and the fourth, as well as the changes in the republished version of the fourth essay, have caused them to be read and anthologized separately. In her groundbreaking dissertation on Zitkala-Sa, Alice Poindexter Fisher calls only the first three essays "autobiographical" (20).3 Following Fisher and the 1985 edition of American Indian Stories, some critics have considered the 1 900 essays as a self-contained trilogy and have drawn conclusions about Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical writings on them, completely disregarding the fourth essay.4 Arizona Quarterly Volume f, Number 1, Spring 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 50Roumiana Velïkova The incorporation of "Why I Am a Pagan" into the series began when Classic American Autobiographies (1992) reprinted all "Four Autobiographical Narratives" from the original articles in the Atlantic Monthly.5 In his introduction to the anthology, William L. Andrews pays special attention to "Why I Am a Pagan" and concludes that Zitkala-Sa's deliberately incomplete record of her lonely efforts to reclaim and re-form herself forecasts the challenge that would face twentieth-century Americans who define themselves in opposition to their country's accelerating demand for the finished article, the made man, the "well-adjusted individual." (18) Andrews' remark derives from the last sentence of "Why I Am a Pagan ": "If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan" ("Four" 462). With his emphasis on the "deliberate" incompleteness of the autobiography , Andrews does more justice to Zitkala-Sa's artistry than Fisher when she claims that Zitkala-Sa attempted to achieve "wholeness " and failed. "In examining the cameo of her life and literature," Fisher notices that Zitkala-Sa struggled toward a vision ofwholeness in which the conflicting parts of her existence could be reconciled. That she did not fully succeed is evident in her work, which is a model of ambivalences , of oscillations between two diametrically opposed worlds, but is also a model of retrieved possibilities, a creative, human endeavor that stands at the beginning of many such endeavors eventually to culminate in the finely crafted work of contemporary American Indian writers. (26—27) Reclaiming Zitkala-Sa for the canon, Fisher at the same time classifies her as a minor figure and mere precursor of later, and better, achievements in Native American literature. Such a progressivist view frequently works to the detriment of the earlier artist whose sensibilities and techniques are farther removed from our own. Moreover, while Fisher is correct to claim that Zitkala-Sa aimed at "a vision of wholeness ," it seems only logical to consider the autobiographical series in its entirety in order to trace the steps by which the author achieves that goal artistically, something Fisher does not do. Nor does any other pub- Zitkah-Sa's Autobiographical Writings51 lished commentary on Zitkala-Sa's essays follow consistently the symbolic patterns into which she molds the facts of her life from "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" to "The Great Spirit." Even Patricia Okker...