America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and the Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars

Chapter One: Progressive Middlebrow: Dorothy Canfield, Reform, and Women’s Magazines

[ 23 ] ss ONE Progressive Middlebrow Dorothy Canfield, Reform, and Women’s Magazines [][][][] In 1902, before each became a best-selling novelist, Dorothy Canfield and Willa Cather suffered a catastrophic break in their friendship. Cather, preparing her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, included one called “The Profile,” based on Evelyn Osbourne, with whom Canfield and Cather had traveled in Europe. When Canfield read the story, she was concerned that publication would upset Evelyn, and wrote Cather an emotional plea: I have read the story and just as you thought I do ask that you do not publish it—not for my own sake but so that you will not have done a cruel thing. . . . I beg you will all my heart . . . not to strike a cruel and overwhelming blow to one who has not deserved it, who has already lost her life’s happiness through her deformity, and who was kind to you. . . . Believe me, who have thought with such sick intensity about it that it will injure you in the end—in every way—and I think it would crush Evelyn—I don’t believe she would ever recover from the blow of your description of her affliction. (Madigan 26–27) Canfield’s response may seem overly sensitive, and one could read her as choosing personal relationships over art. For Canfield, however, writing 24 ] america the middlebrow was a profoundly human endeavor, an activity whose primary mission was to create an emotional experience for the reader. She could only see Cather’s story as a betrayal, not only of friendship but of the calling of authorship as she understood it. Cather, and her companion Isabelle McClung, writing on her behalf, saw things very differently. The story was Cather’s artistic creation, and any connection to a living person was incidental and in the end unimportant . For McClung, the difficult process of artistic work mattered more than the emotional effects the story might have on readers, or one reader in particular. In the end, Canfield felt that her obligation to protect her helpless friend from harm was more important than Cather’s right to publish the story. She finally appealed directly to McClure’s, threatening legal action unless they removed the story, and succeeded in blocking its publication.1 Canfield’s confrontation with Cather prefigures the writer she would become—a beloved popular novelist who focused, primarily, on the emotional experience of her readers, and was interested in formal technique only as it served that end. Her sympathy toward middle-class readers made modernist critics dismiss her as the great genteel defender.2 For most of them, Canfield seemed the embodiment of all that kept America from having a “usable past”— the quintessential New England reformer. She consciously constructed her authorial identity with readers, not critics, in mind, and kept doggedly to her political and aesthetic commitments , disregarding cultural capital. Canfield’s primary authorial focus on emotion and liberal causes made her a prototypic middlebrow author. New England Reformer, Redux: Construction of Authorship Dorothy Canfield was a tireless activist. She introduced Progressive-era readers to Maria Montessori, served on the state board of education, was a Book-of-the-Month Club judge, did relief work in France during World War I, and advocated for the United Nations and universal human rights—this in addition to writing extensive articles, short stories, and novels. Such was her energy that the critic Grant Overton, in 1928, felt the need to lecture her to choose between art and life; he predicted a successful career “if the world can contrive to run itself for a little while” (73). For Canfield, as for John Dewey, art and life were intertwined; her activism and her writing were complementary activities. The greatgranddaughter of abolitionists, with Vermont roots that predated the [ 25 progressive middlebrow Revolutionary War, Canfield was the secular, modern heir of sentimental activist-writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child. Her father, James Hulme Canfield, a university professor and president, was an advocate of suffrage, civil rights for African Americans, and free trade; hermother,FlaviaCanfield,would-beartist,ledherdaughteronextended stays in Paris and Spain (Washington 16), and introduced her to music, painting, and literature. Canfield was trained thoroughly in the European literary tradition, attending French schools and later the...