Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical: Writings from the 1890s (review)

In Prairie Radical, Donald Pizer presents Hamlin Garland as an angry writer, fighting to change American literature and politics. Divided in two sections, with four fictional works comprising the first half and nine nonfiction works in the second half, the collection explores fundamental social issues, such as farming, marriage, taxation, land ownership, women’s rights, modern drama, and literary realism. These polemic writings are from the author’s early period (1888–1895) and help readers to rediscover the Garland known for Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Crumbling Idols (1894), and Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895).

Garland considered himself a “son of the middle border,” having lived on farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota at a time when pioneers were settling the Midwest. In 1887, as Pizer explains in his introduction, Garland visited his parents’ South Dakota homestead, after having studied in Boston. He found them struggling, especially his mother, no better off than when he left. The anger and guilt caused by this trip motivated Garland to write stories and essays that challenged the myth of the West. Farm life was harsh, especially for women, and Garland believed that severe labor brutalized all workers. To counter idyllic myths, Garland called for place-based, realistic literature, and the fictional stories in Pizer’s collection exemplify this well—they are revolutionary works that were too harsh to be popular.

In two stories, “A Common Case” (1888) and “John Boyle’s Conclusion” (1888), Garland depicts existence as a brutal struggle that ends in death, and death is represented as a welcome release. In the first, Matilda Bent, an ailing farm wife, is remembered as a pretty girl “murdered” by brutal pioneer life. Struggling with cancer, Matilda works until she cannot get out of bed. As she is dying, a neighbor, Martha Ridings, visits. During this vigil, under the influence of opiates, Matilda blames her husband for her condition and imagines her mother caring for her—she longs for death. In the second story, a toil-worn farmer and his wife witness the destruction of their third crop in three years. Like Job and his wife, one disaster after another befalls these pioneers. Living in a sod hut, inundated by heat, flies, wind and water, surviving on potatoes and salt pork, the couple lack the money or will to begin again. In the end, John Boyle jumps in the river, committing suicide, and Mrs. Boyle dies in a poor house. These early stories seem precursors to works by authors such as Katherine Anne Porter and Susan Glaspell, who depicted women as trapped by circumstances, but also to works by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, who characterized life as a brutal battle.

In the second two stories, the characters are victims of land speculators, bad marriages, nature, fate, and weak constitutions, but Garland modulates his angry tone, presenting complex situations. In “A Prairie Heroine,” Lucretia Burns, a middle-aged woman, sallow, faded, worn-out, tormented by flies and mosquitoes, almost dead, has the strength to stand against her husband Sim Burns, a stubborn farmer who has also been brutalized by labor. In their three-room house, the family lives like animals, like the poor in the “North End” of Boston. After Sim yells at Lucretia for not milking the cows, she moves to the attic, refusing to sleep or eat with her husband. If not for the children, she would poison herself. Learning of the family’s problems, the local school teacher, armed with the theories of a radical law student, forces Mr. Burns to apologize and helps the couple realize that neither is to blame—the teacher might have stepped out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel. Garland’s short story is harshly realistic, but it has both a humorous tone and a polemic message. The final story in the collection, “The Land of the Straddle-Bug,” although set in South Dakota in 1883, explores whether or not adultery can be justified. The...