Ella Rhoads Higginson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Pacific Northwest Women’s Literary Regionalism

Ella Higginson has created her own field in American fiction; she has taken a new country and given us new types. What Mary Wilkins is to the East, she is to the West; and there is not another short story writer in this country today who can compare with either of them. (1235)

Rev. of A Forest Orchid. Peterson Magazine, Dec. 1897

In her 1899 short story, “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater,” Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson ([1862]–1940) resituates and rewrites Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s well-known story “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” (1890).¹ In so doing, Higginson establishes a pivotal association between Pacific Northwest women’s literary regionalism and postbellum New England women’s literary regionalism.² Rewriting “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” enables Higginson to activate a cross-regionalist literary conversation regarding the social and material conditions of US white women. Higginson employs the New England of “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” as a recognized literary regional norm against which to delineate more precisely how, in contrast, the Pacific Northwest region might “function culturally, politically, and nationally” (Kollin 414).³ “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater” is important because it prompts a critical re-view of late-nineteenth-century US women’s regionalism in its resolute appending of the Pacific Northwest to other literary regions of the nation and its corresponding interruption of the dominance of New England in women’s literary regionalism.⁴

The Pacific Northwest remains, as Susan Kollin writes, “largely undertheorized in studies of American literary history” (414).⁵ Among the valuable exceptions to this surprising neglect is, for example, John Cleman’s examination of the “relative obscurity of the Oregon poet and novelist” H. L. Davis. Cleman contends that “lack of critical or popular interest” in Davis and his work is “a sign of the [Pacific Northwest] region’s defining marginality” (431). For Cleman, “a major (or canonical) distinctly regionalist work of Pacific Northwest fiction—comparable to Country of the Pointed Firs, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, My Ántonia, or The Sound and the Fury—has yet to appear” (448).

Kollin resists such emphasis on regionalist major works as unduly restrictive and exclusionist. She argues that “by allowing concerns about canonicity and literary value to dominate debates about regionalism . . . literary critics end up narrowing the scope of their study, overlooking other issues that deserve scholarly attention” (413). Kollin’s important discussion draws on writings by twentieth-and twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest writers Sherman Alexie, Timothy Egan, Ken Kesey, and Marilynne Robinson. My essay builds on work regarding Pacific Northwest literary regionalism by scholars such as Cleman and Kollin. However, mine is the first to focus inquiry on an earlier Pacific Northwest literary regionalist text—that is, writing from the turn into the twentieth century—and deliberately to foreground the writing of a significant, forgotten Pacific Northwest woman author.

Reviewers often referenced Wilkins’s fiction when discussing Higginson’s: a review of Mariella in the Buffalo Express, for instance, opined that “[t]he character work in it is equal to Miss Wilkins’s best.”⁶ A review of Higginson’s poetry collection When the Birds Go North Again in the Los Angeles Herald similarly commented, “It has often been said of [Higginson] that she has portrayed the life of the Pacific Slope with a skill and artistic feeling which gives her for the West the position that Miss Wilkins has achieved for the New England States” (22). However, reviewers were also quick to note that Higginson’s fiction transcended such similarities. For example: “It would seem from these stories as if a new Mary E. Wilkins may have arisen to bring Puget Sound within the literary horizon. There is no trace of imitation. On the contrary, the sketches are notably new work, notwithstanding a marked general resemblance to the earlier stories of Miss Wilkins” (Rev. of The Flower). This quotation and others like it indicate reviewers’ identification of both the originality of Higginson’s fiction and its resonances with Wilkins’s.

In particular, the lives and behaviors of Higginson’s fictive regional white women differ instructively from Wilkins’s. Mary R. Reichardt has identified Wilkins’s focus as “women’s struggles for self-assertion and self-identity in often repressive and impoverished circumstances” (Introduction ix). Among those circumstances are potent remnants of New England’s Calvinist past, which contribute to the amplified senses of duty, guilt, and independence seen in Wilkins’s women. Conversely, Higginson’s Pacific Northwest white women are unencumbered by post-Calvinist pressures. They behave disruptively, often enacting barely repressed passions. Reflecting late-nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest demographics and conditions, Higginson’s women occupy a sparsely populated region inhabited by more white men than women, most struggling for economic stability. Higginson explores literary meanings and uses of region by imbricating Pacific Northwest regional characteristics—isolation, wide territory, wild terrain, more readily granting voting rights to white women—into her white female characters.⁷ That is, Higginson deploys region as an element possessing singular features that significantly shape the social and material conditions of her fictive white women. Higginson’s use of region in “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater” results in a distinctive literary portrait that resists the prevailing literary regionalism of postbellum New England.

A comparison of “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater” to “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” (both published in Harper’s Bazar, nine years apart) reveals how Higginson revises Wilkins’s plots and themes to fit a Pacific Northwest perspective. Ellen Gruber Garvey details the powerful cultural “reverberations” of “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” noting that in the decades after its publication the story “was read in city and rural homes, high school and college classrooms, and was performed in public readings and amateur theatricals” (119).⁸ As a result, by the time Higginson turned to “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater,” “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” with its compelling narrative of gender, family, and farm life, would have been fully resonant in Higginson’s literary orbit.

To summarize, in “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” Sarah Penn is stunned to learn that her husband, Adoniram, has begun building a second barn on a lot long reserved for a new house. After decades of silent acquiescence to her husband, Sarah protests, “plead[ing] her little cause like a Webster”: “When we was married, forty year ago, you promised me faithful that we should have a new house built in that lot over in the field before the year was out” (70). Faced with obstinate resistance, Sarah engages in the revolt of the story’s title. She “move[d] all their little household goods into the new barn while her husband was away.” When he returns, the sight leaves him “dazed,” “pale and frightened”: “‘What on airth does this mean, mother?’ he gasped.” She firmly replies, “The house wa’n’t fit for us to live in any longer, an’ I made up my mind I wa’n’t goin’ to stay there. I’ve done my duty by you forty year, an’ I’m goin’ to do it now; but I’m goin’ to live here.” At the story’s end, her husband weeps, declaring, “‘Why, mother,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘I hadn’t no idee you was so set on’t as all this comes to’” (74, 77, 78).

The plot of “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater” turns on the same dynamic as “The Revolt of ‘Mother.’” Like Sarah Penn, Orilla Slater has grown used to the “calm, seemingly premeditated obstinacy” of her husband, Uriah (294). She is nonetheless stunned to learn that he plans to have a well dug next to the gate rather than in the yard as she has asked. She first appeals to him, “‘I do the house-work and the washing and I want the well where it will be handiest for me.’ She put her hand pleadingly on his arm. ‘Come out in the yard with me, Uriah, an’ I’ll show you right where I want it. You can’t help seeing it’s just the place for it.’” When he rejects her entreaties and is unmoved by a special meal she prepares, she issues a final plea: “I beg you, I beseech you, to give up to me in this. I’ve been giving up to you ever since we were married. You give up to me this time.” She then says twice, “If you don’t—” but he pushes her aside and leaves (296, 298).

Both Sarah Penn and Orilla Slater have husbands who are insensitive to their pragmatic concerns about the development of their property, both confront their husbands about construction they consider to be deal-breakers, and both their husbands dismiss their concerns, expecting no real consequences. Both Sarah and Orilla take drastic steps in response to their husbands’ indifference, but Wilkins’s New England character finds a rapprochement with her husband, while Higginson’s Orilla, apparently conditioned by the expansive Pacific Northwest, sees a much more radical solution.

When Uriah returns home, he finds a letter from Orilla: “dear uriah,—I’ve gone home. I can’t ever live with you again. It’ll break my heart. I’ll love you just the same till the last day of my life. But I can’t ever live with you again” (298). Uriah is first “amused” (“‘Talk’s cheap,’ grinned Uriah. ‘I’ll give her three days’”), then “angry; then furious; finally his anger gave place to terror” (298). It takes “a full month before he could make up his mind to go after Orilla and bring her home.” Her response stuns him: “It had never occurred to him that she would refuse. ‘She just wants to make me knuckle down,’ he had thought, judging her by his own small soul. ‘She wants to scare me into it.’” When Orilla again refuses, “terror clutched his heart. He pleaded earnestly and desperately” and then “hesitated, wondering even in that critical moment, if any further concession was necessary; something in her face made him feel that it was, and he went on—‘I’ll put a pump in, too!’” But Orilla replies, “‘I’ll never go back. You needn’t say any more. I love you. I’ve suffered, and I’ll keep on suffering. But I can stand this kind of suffering better’n I could a lifetime of being nagged at and hissed at and contraried every time you happened to feel stubborn. Six months of it’s a plenty for me’” (298–99). Then, in the lines that end the story, she “took up the tongs with a firm hand and stirred the fire. The sparks went up the chimney in a scarlet stream” (299).

In both texts, a wife’s desires amplify a husband’s intractability. However, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” provides resolution. Confronted by Sarah’s unanticipated defiant acts, Adoniram breaks down and yields regarding the barn. Sarah accepts his yielding, and marital peace is restored. But it is only restored in the moment—nothing suggests that Sarah should not expect the “lifetime of being nagged at and hissed at and contraried” that Orilla rejects (299). That surprising rejection is at the core of Higginson’s revision of Wilkins’s text.

Reichardt sees “Sarah’s rebellion as limited in scope, for she has no intention of abandoning her customary submissive roles as wife and mother” (Mary Wilkins 43). Orilla’s rebellion, however, is unlimited in scope, for she intends to abandon her customary submissive role as wife. Orilla’s agency is allowed by three crucial differences from Sarah: the newness of her marriage, her youth, and her child-free status. First, because Orilla’s marriage is recent, while Sarah’s is established, Orilla is newly oppressed and still adjusting to that oppression, while Sarah is long oppressed and accustomed to it. Further, Orilla’s youth renders it more likely that her mother may be living and so if she leaves her marriage she will have a place to go. Sarah likely has nowhere to go further than the new barn. Finally, because Orilla has no children, she, unlike Sarah (aptly called “Mother” by her husband), decides only for herself, while Sarah must also consider her children.

Higginson’s crucial revision of Wilkins in this text identifies key regional differences between Wilkins’s New England (established like Sarah and her marriage) and the Pacific Northwest (newly settled and with greater possibility, like Orilla). Higginson then dramatizes what those differences allow, particularly for fictive white women. Wilkins presented readers with an older, long-married, postbellum New England white woman with children who successfully rebelled within the narrow confines of her marriage. In reply, Higginson presents readers with a younger, recently married, Pacific Northwest white woman without children who also successfully rebels but then rejects her marriage entirely. Higginson’s employment of regional culture and geography results in the Pacific Northwest woman Orilla Slater; like her region she is young, less settled, and more self-determined.

Additionally, the rural sites of each text differ instructively. Wilkins’s setting in “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” is embedded in an interactive community; neighbors, hired men, and a local minister come to the farm. The setting of “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater” features a more removed, less involved community—an unseen man who digs the well, Orilla’s mother who never visits, and two watchful village women. Higginson’s setting reflects the Pacific Northwest’s sparse population and largely uninterrupted isolation. Here, no minister arrives to reason with Orilla after she leaves Uriah.

In “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater,” Higginson engaged in a critical conversation about literary regionalism, seeking to explore what region means and how it is deployed. Adapting “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” Higginson skillfully read Wilkins’s postbellum New England against the Pacific Northwest in order to characterize the latter and its white women. She portrayed the region as vast, unsettled, and independent, a place that functioned culturally by producing white women shaped by regional characteristics—less settled and more independent themselves. She depicted the region operating politically by developing white women whose enfranchisement was shaped by the open, democratic possibilities of the territory. She demonstrated the region performing nationally as a distinct location that claimed recognition and membership among better-known US regions.

Through such means Higginson composed a text that established a Pacific Northwest with region-specific qualities that informed the social and material conditions of white women. The greater significance of Higginson’s depictions of the Pacific Northwest as singular in its characteristics resides in the ways her story disputes readings “constructed by the nation-state to serve its own interests” (Fetterley and Pryse 31)—readings of the region as remote, non-eastern, and by implication less important. Instead, Higginson provided a critical regionalism that “offer[ed] alternative understandings” of US culture, one that invited readers into her regional discourse (Fetterley and Pryse 31). In “The Stubbornness of Uriah Slater,” Higginson’s Pacific Northwesternizing of Wilkins’s classic “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” repositioned the Pacific Northwest from the far cultural margins, placing it instead on the literary map as a distinctive region of the larger nation. My recovery here of the correlation between these two texts marks an early stage of a much more extensive discussion. Further critical investigation will be needed to advance the important conversation regarding both the substantial, forgotten body of Higginson’s works as well as larger considerations of Pacific Northwest literary regionalism.