Of Epiphanies and Poets: Gene Stratton-Porter's Domestic Transcendentalism

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up. . . . If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature he never saw before and leads him one step towards the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book.

-Gene Stratton-Porter, quoted in Meehan 304

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.

-Walt Whitman, Section 21, "Song of Myself"

Gene Stratton-Porter (1863-1924) was one of the most successful American authors of the early twentieth century, but surprisingly little has been written about her.¹ Most critics have dismissed her work as sentimental, without defining the term, or have recognized her reliance on nature, without identifying its significance to her work.² Though overlooked and underestimated, Stratton-Porter's work serves as a significant link in the history of American ideas through its manifestation of a Transcendental ethos. Stratton-Porter introduces Transcendentalism to a wide range of non-academic readers by depicting men and women who experience epiphanies and serve as the translators of higher spiritual truths.

Her enthusiasm for the views advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of Transcendentalism, and his acknowledged disciples Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman affects the very structure of her fiction.³ Stratton-Porter affirms their interpretations of Nature, divinity, and humanity, adapting and expanding them to suit her audience and her era.⁴ The resulting philosophy, embodied in but not limited to Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), emphasizes social, rather than individual, awareness as well as a dedication to environmentalism that is absent in traditional Transcendentalism. Ultimately, Stratton-Porter's fiction exemplifies American Idealism and effectively demonstrates how Americans might engage in a domestic Transcendentalism.

A surprising number of direct references to the Transcendentalists appears in Stratton-Porter's work and confirms the extent of their influence on her. Acknowledging her lack of formal education, she wrote that "like Thoreau, I never worried over diplomas, and unlike most school children, I studied harder after leaving school than ever before" (qtd. in Meehan 35). In an essay for McCall's published in the 1920s (and posthumously published in Let Us Highly Resolve in 1927), Stratton-Porter addressed the issue of "Books in the Home." She favored, "of course . . . Emerson, and Thoreau, whose books can by no possibility be too highly recommended for their truth to Nature and to human nature" (237-38). On the dedication page of The Harvester (1911), she wrote, "This portion of the life of a man of today is offered in the hope that in cleanliness, poetic temperament, and mental force, a likeness will be seen to Henry David Thoreau."⁵ Finally, while delivering a paper on Whitman's Leaves of Grass for a literary society meeting in Geneva, Indiana, she asserted that her quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, and a few other authors on the merits of Whitman's work gave "incontrovertible proofs" in support of her thesis: "Everything I say I hedge about with quotations from these masters of the Nineteenth Century" (qtd. in Meehan 99-100).⁶ According to Ed Folsom, by the early 1880s, Whitman's "fortunes had begun to decline as writers reacted against the earlier enthusiasm; the 1880s saw the first serious reassessment of Whitman's reputation" (354). Yet clearly Stratton-Porter was not only familiar with his work but also valued it.⁷

Stratton-Porter's world view coincides with Emerson's at several key points. Emerson announces that Nature is an "incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. . . . Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?" (Nature 38-39). For Stratton-Porter as well, Nature is undeniably a reflection of the soul and an affirmation of God. She writes in "Religion as a Stimulus":

I put much...