Kate Douglas Wiggin's Portraits of the Artist as a Girl

Kate Douglas Wiggin's Portraits of the Artist as a Girl According to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), some nineteenth-century female writers tried to avoid being attacked for presumptuous authorial ambitions through the "self-denial" of "writing in the 'lesser' genres" such as "children's books" "or by limiting their readership to 'mere' women like themselves" (72). Studies of authors such as Louisa May Alcott and Frances Hodgson Burnett have shown that this strategy did not necessarily shelter such writers from being attacked nor from having critical condescension affect their authorial self-image. Such insecurities can be seen in Kate Douglas Wiggin's autobiography. Mv Garden of Memory ( 1923); and the difficulty with which nineteenth-century women defined themselves as authors can be seen in Rebecca of Sunnvbrook Farm ( 1903) and New Chronicles of Rebecca ( 1907). Wiggin's autobiography reveals a woman who consistently underplayed her talents as musician, actress, oral reader, and writer. From her youth, she spent much energy pioneering in the kindergarten movement, and it was a long time before she saw herself as an author. Writing her autobiography in her mid-sixties, she repeatedly avows the modesty of her literary talents, ambitions, and achievements; moreover, she tries to convey her acceptance of this modesty. Often she convinces, because her memoir is generally good-humored and because she communicates much satisfaction with her many activities besides authorship. Sometimes, however, the reader is not totally assured. Emphatic that popularity does not indicate literary quality, she is sensitive to the critical patronizing books with wide circulation received. She says she "didn't particularly wish" to write a book that would find "itself among the 'bestsellers .....because of the critics who invariably remark that the Walter Paters, the George Merediths, the Samuel Butlers, and the Matthew Arnolds have to content themselves with a small but select company of readers, while the best-sellers cater to an ignorant, raving mob " (324). Wiggin's reaction to patronizing criticism of the play version ofRebecca when it opened in London ( 1912) suggests that she had not entirely given up the desire to be recognized as a major talent. In a letter to her husband she wrote, "They say that plays by women are seldom reviewed with anything but condescension here, and it is idle to pretend that American plays are sympathetically regarded at the moment." Despite this acknowledgement, however, Wiggin was unwilling to accept the idea that negative criticism might result from a reviewer's own limitations; "I do not believe personally, and never did, in these forms of antagonism." Rather, she accepted such criticism as a valid measurement of her talent and achievement: "If it had been a better play, it would have overcome" the critics' "peculiar form of aversion" (406). She had to lecture herself into acceptance of her modest achievement: "I must remember that up to this time Rebecca has been one of the happiest experiences of my life----- I should be able to bear a slight disappointment with philosophy" (407). Writing for "mere" women did not entirely satisfy Wiggin. "When I feel a trifle depressed that my audience is chiefly one of girls and women," she says, "I re-read an. occasional letter from men"; then she quotes Jack London's letter gushing about Rebecca (353). Her anxiety about male approval is demonstrated also by comments about her high school readings: I freely confess that it is with great trepidation that I approach boys. . . . The girls invariably complain . . . because they say that I pay so much more attention to the boys than to them. It is quite true, although I did not imagine it was obvious; but I 71¦ß" am secretly terrified by youthful persons of the male sex—afraid of not pleasing them, knowing that a great inventor, explorer, or aviator could give them the needful things. (423) Finally, Wiggin could not decide whether her authorial goals were appropriately modest or inappropriately ambitious: Years and years ago 1 said: To write a book that two successive generations of children might love, read twice, and put under their pillows at night, oh! what joy of joys, greater than showers of gold...