make a living but for the same reasons that ambitious men (and a few women) had always turned to novel writing: to create original works of art.
Perfectly reflecting the period is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's argument in her essay 'Men and Art' in The Man-Made World (1911). She points to a major difference between 'art' and 'Art,' the former being what women had been allowed to do according to Gilman, the latter what men had reserved for themselves. Consequently Gilman declares of the 'primitive arts' of women such as 'pottery, basketry, leatherwork, needlework, weaving,' and the like: 'Much of this is strong and beautiful, but its time is long past.' Such creations are 'not Art with a large A, the Art which requires Artists, among whom -272- are so few women of note.' What women in the modern world need to do, Gilman argues, is invade and then redefine and adapt for themselves the territory of high art traditionally denied them, including and especially literature.
By the time Gilman's book saw print, there were many women in the United States already asserting their right to be, in her shorthand, Artists. For a number of native-born white women such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Mary Austin, Ellen Glasgow, Gilman herself, or Willa Cather, it is probably accurate to say that the most pressing issue was finding a way to reconcile the conflict embodied for them in the terms 'woman' and 'artist.' For other equally ambitious women who were women of color or immigrants (or both), authors such as Frances Ellen Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Winnifred Eaton, Sui Sin Far, Hum-ishuma, and Anzia Yezierska, the challenge was even more complex. It involved combating racist, cultural, and entrenched class biases as well as gender issues.
One way of understanding the range and complexity of the issues dealt with by women novelists in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is through brief consideration of a few representative careers. Useful for the purpose here, although many different choices could be made, are the following five writers: Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930), Edith Wharton (1862–1937), Winnifred Eaton (1875–1954), Willa Cather (1873–1947), and Humishu-ma (1888–1936).
A biographical sketch published in The Colored American Magazine in 1901 (and no doubt written by the author herself) outlines Pauline Hopkins's ambition as a novelist. The piece announces that she aims to write fiction about racism that will reach all classes of readers and explains that 'Contending Forces [1900] is her first published work.' It was also her last separately published novel. As the sketch bluntly observes: 'Pauline Hopkins has struggled to the position which she now holds in the same fashion that all Northern colored women have to struggle — through hardships, disappointments, and with very little encouragement. What she has accomplished has been done by a grim determination to 'stick at it,' even though failure might await her in the end.' After Contending Forces, Hopkins was able to bring out three more novels serially in The-273- Colored American Magazine, where she served as literary editor from 1900 to 1904: Hagar's Daughter (1901), Winona (1902), and Of One Blood (1902). But she was not able to publish those novels as individual volumes nor to follow Contending Forces with any other separately issued novel. The difficulties announced in the 1901 sketch proved all too real.
Hopkins's resolve as an African American woman writer to create her own kind of art and to speak her mind pitted her against tremendous obstacles of racial, sexual, and therefore economic discrimination. Like that of any writer, her life as a publishing artist depended on having a publisher. But as an African American woman committed to writing honestly about race issues and needing to support herself financially, finding an outlet for her work was extremely difficult. During the few years that she worked at the Colored American while it was published in Boston, she was indefatigable and prolific. However, when the magazine changed direction and moved to New York following its secret purchase by Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist policies Hopkins opposed, she lost her outlet. She tried to place work elsewhere and even created her own publishing company. But her efforts failed. Though she lived until 1930, she was not able to continue to publish novels after the four that appeared in the unbelievably short span of 1900 to 1902.
All four of Hopkins's novels focus on African American people's battles with racism in the United States, three of them giving preeminence to women's stories; and each shows her testing and expanding the form of the novel to make it serve her purposes. Interweaving stories of familial rupture and reunion, violation and restoration, Contending Forces links past and present to expose late nineteenthcentury, white, rape- lynch mythology as the modern reincarnation of the ethos underlying slavery. Similarly, Hagar's Daughter and Winona deal with the institution of slavery and connect it to the modern African American woman's struggle to define herself against powerful forces of erasure. Most experimental formally is Hopkins's last novel, Of One Blood, which mixes realism, melodrama, journalism, dime novel techniques, and dream prophecy to create a parable about racism, healing, the African American woman artist, and pan-African wholeness. -274-
Hopkins's images of the African American woman artist in Contending Forces and Of One Blood clearly signal her anger about her own situation as an African American woman writer. The woman artist in her first novel is shadowy. Significantly named Sappho, she reveals her creative potential only in hints: her name, the beauty she creates around herself, the passion she feels for her child, the occupation of stenography (Hopkins's own occupation) by which she supports herself. This character is important yet vague — purposefully hard to see and know. In Contending Forces, the African American woman artist's fate in the United States is to have been raped by her white uncle, and her story is one of painful reclamation of identity.
Much less optimistic in its conclusion is Hopkins's account of the woman artist in her last novel. In Of One Blood, the soprano Dianthe Lusk is deceived, sexually violated, silenced, and finally murdered by the book's principal white male character. In this book Hopkins openly celebrates the African American woman artist, connecting her to a long, ancient line of foremothers in Africa. She then shows her violent silencing in the modern United States. Rendered doubly vulnerable by race and gender, Hopkins's woman artist has a rich, glorious past. What she does not have, in this story, is a future. Violent racism kills her.
Born to privilege in a wealthy, white, Old New York family, Edith Wharton enjoyed a career that contrasts sharply with Hopkins's. Inherited income, leisure, freedom from domestic labor, and the security of an excellent private education positioned Wharton for success. Her impressive production of close to twenty novels, eleven volumes of short stories, and numerous essays and articles from the late 1890s to the early 1930s cannot be separated from the advantages of her race and class.
Edith Wharton did have to struggle to turn herself into an artist. Totally leisure-class in their expectation that she would devote herself to nothing but marriage, motherhood, and a life of constant hostessing and visiting, her parents were drawn neither to the arts nor to the life of the mind; and the marriage that she made in 1885 turned out to be deadly. Acutely depressed, she involved herself, on her doctor's advice, in fiction writing in earnest; but as she grew stronger, her husband grew severely depressed. Finally Edith Wharton sued for -275- divorce — against the Wharton family's wishes — in 1913. Although she had an affair early in the twentieth century, she never remarried; and she lived most of her life after the turn of the century in France.
Wharton's rebellion against her class's, her family's, and her husband's expectations reflected the historical moment. Although highly conservative and elitist in many ways, she was nevertheless part of a new generation of women at the end of the nineteenth century who believed in their right to realize their own creativity and ambitions much as privileged men, at least in theory, always had. Indeed, a central issue for Wharton, many scholars argue, was the intensity of her male identification as an artist. If the production of high art, historically, was reserved for men, then how was one as a woman to pursue that goal? Was it possible to be both an artist and a woman? Wharton's most direct answer appears in her first novel, The Touchstone (1900), which has at its center the novelist Margaret Aubyn. She is brilliant, critically acclaimed, and prolific. She is also ugly, unrequited in love, and, by the time the novel opens, dead. The fears embodied in this early representation of the woman artist are clear; desexualization, rejection, and an early death are her fate.
After The Touchstone Wharton's novels return only covertly to the subject of the woman artist. She included the figure obliquely in The Age of Innocence (1920) in the character of Ellen Olenska, but frequently Wharton made her artists and artist-figures male. Looked at one way, this disappearance of the woman artist after The Touchstone suggests resolution. The author acknowledged her fears in her first novel and exorcised them. Looked at another way, however, Wharton's fiction suggests lifelong, unresolved conflict about her own identity as a woman writer. Critics have commented on the
