The Columbia History of the American Novel

almost too-perfect precision and distancing of narrative technique in her work — her fear of admitting feeling and emotion — and Wharton has been charged with hostility toward her women characters. Both practices can be interpreted as manifestations of conflict. They can be read as the author's self-defensive attempt to secure her status as an artist in a male-dominated world by separating herself from 'feminine' fiction — that is, allegedly soft, second-rate work — and from other women.

Edith Wharton succeeded brilliantly at writing her way into the tradition of the high-art novel in the United States. Her work enjoyed -276- critical acclaim and a popular readership; given her presence, it was difficult to doubt women's abilities as literary artists. Indeed, one reason that the next generation of young white male authors such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner needed so desperately to assert the masculinity of novel writing was that their youth had been dominated not by great male novelists but by great female ones. Attacking writers such as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather as old-fashioned, prudish, and boring was one way of making room for themselves.

In contrast to Edith Wharton and her ambition to create elite art, Winnifred Eaton aimed directly for popular commercial success. Born in Canada the daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother, she was one of fourteen children and the family was poor. As an adult, she wrote most often under the Japanese-sounding pseudonym Onoto Watanna, supporting herself and her four children, particularly after her divorce, by writing popular romances, most of them set in Japan and almost all of them love stories. That is, she capitalized upon rather than rejected the well-established tradition of popular women's fiction in the United States; and she was extremely successful. The first woman of Chinese ancestry to publish novels in the United States, Winnifred Eaton brought out fourteen novels between the late 1890s and the mid-1920 s.

Unlike her sister who published short fiction under the name Sui Sin Far and thereby openly acknowledged her Chinese ancestry, Winnifred Eaton responded to virulent anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States at the turn of the century by suppressing her own heritage and assuming, instead, a Japanese identity. Her strategy, as Amy Ling argues, was one of adaptation, subterfuge, and subversion rather than open confrontation. By reinventing her background, she could cater to the reading public's fascination with Japan and thus exploit Asian subject matter in a positive, albeit stereotypic, way without churning up the racism — or at least the same kind or the amount of racism — that Chinese subject matter would produce.

The full meaning and the cost of Eaton's successful disguise are not easy to measure. She brilliantly participated in a strategy of deliberately assumed false identity and infiltration that women artists, defined as outsiders, have made use of from George Eliot (and earlier) on. At the same time, as Onoto Watanna she centered her creative life -277- in an act of denial that clearly seems to have created pain as well as a degree of freedom. Her autobiography, Me(1915), in which she calls herself 'Nora Ascough' and identifies her mother simply as 'foreign,' reflects bitterly at one point: 'My success was founded upon a cheap and popular device. . Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage [sic].' In alluding here to the biblical story of Esau and, even more immediately and tellingly, to the famous reference to it at the end of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Eaton suggests how hard it was for her, at least at times, to pretend to be someone she was not. The rampant anti-Chinese bigotry of her era placed her in an untenable position. As she saw it, and certainly she was not imagining things, to survive and thrive as a novelist she had to deny a basic part of herself.

This confusion and guilt about hiding one's identity appears clearly in Onoto Watanna's early novel about a woman artist, A Japanese Nightingale (1901). In order to secure enough money to help her brother come home to Japan, the heroine, a teahouse dancer who is half Japanese and half Caucasian, sells herself in marriage to a white American. In keeping her economic motive a secret, she keeps from her husband her full story as a human being and her pain and isolation at having to live a lie. As a 'real' story about a woman artist in Japan, the book is frequently thin and farfetched. As a disguised story about its author's own disguise as an artist, however, it is revealing. It says that economic necessity, secrecy and isolation, and flattery of whites consume the major part of a Eurasian woman artist's life.

Willa Cather's ambition as a novelist, like Wharton's, was to distinguish herself as an artist. As Sharon O'Brien has argued, Cather's long apprenticeship as a novelist was dominated by the conflict she felt as a middle- class white woman between the identities of 'woman' and 'artist,' the former associated for her with domesticity, nurture, and relationality; the latter with public accomplishment, daring intellect, and rule-breaking. Publishing her first short story in 1892, she did not write her first novel until 1912; and during that twenty-year period, as well as occasionally thereafter, Cather outspokenly denigrated women writers. It was a way of separating her-278- self from public accomplishment that was 'feminine.' By attacking women writers she could identify herself with real artists — that is, men. Then in large part through the friendship and example of Sarah Orne Jewett, as O'Brien explains, Cather gradually arrived at a way of integrating her identity as a woman and her ambitions as an artist. Although that integration was always shaky, she was nevertheless able to produce nine novels in about twenty years, as well as many short stories, essays, articles, and autobiographical writings.

Where Cather's story differed radically from Wharton's was in her struggle against homophobia. Profoundly complicating Cather's public career as an artist was her primary, private identification with women, romantically and emotionally, at precisely the time historically that such same-sex relationships were being defined as pathological. Because Victorian ideology assumed that respectable women were asexual, a woman of the previous generation such as Jewett might write with considerable freedom about love between women. But with the breakdown of Victorian ideology toward the end of the nineteenth century came a redefinition of all women (not just 'bad' women) as sexual. Consequently, deep intimate bonds between women no longer qualified as 'innocent.' They became, instead, potentially and even inherently sexual — and, given their rejection of men, clearly 'deviant.' This invention of lesbianism as deviance by the mainstream culture occurred at the same time that Cather was trying to find her voice as an artist. As might be expected, these changes in cultural attitudes toward same-sex emotional and romantic identification among women generated tremendous creative tension for Cather — both inhibiting and fruitful.

Cather wrote most openly about the woman artist in her third novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), and it is significant that the singer Thea Kronborg has her most complete and transforming creative experience in a moment of solitary, magical communion with the earth itself, which Cather clearly depicts as female and simultaneously erotic and maternal. Deep in Panther Canyon, which is described as 'a gentler cañon within a wilder one,' a secret protected place 'hollow (like a great fold in the rock),' Cather's artist, standing naked in a still pool in the sunlight, experiences an epiphany. Embraced by the earth, Thea understands in a flash the utter intercon-279- nectedness of earth, flesh, womb, female sexuality, and artistic form. As a consequence of this powerful, symbolic, same-sex experience deep in the earth she finds herself reborn and renewed as an artist.

Similar covert exploration of same-sex love and of its relationship to artistic creativity exists throughout Cather's fiction. Most obvious probably are the loving relationships between men in The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop(1927). But even in My Ántonia (1918), many critics argue, the central love relationship between Jim and 'Tony' (Antonia) makes most sense if it is read not simply as a heterosexual attraction but also as a camouflaged same-sex one.

Existing in tension with such subversive energies in Cather's novels, however, is her racism. Writing during a period of mounting homophobia, Willa Cather struggled against powerful biases, which she could circumvent only surreptitiously. It is therefore an irony of her work, as must also be said of many other white women's writing at the time, that it is deeply racist and ethnocentric. Even as Cather wrote about white women's struggles against discrimination, including those of immigrants, she ignored living Native Americans in favor of celebrating dead ones, rendered Mexican women invisible, and caricatured African Americans. Like most privileged white women at the time, she did not use her own situation to understand the situations of people of color in the United States.

In sharp contrast to a career such as Cather's, Hum-ishu-ma, also known as Mourning Dove, published one novel, Cogewea, the HalfBlood. Written around 1912, it did not come out until 1927; and the story of its revision and publication forms a critical chapter in United States literary history.

A member of the Okanogan people of the American Northwest, Hum-ishu-ma is usually cited as the first Native American woman novelist. She grew up in what is now Washington state and then on the Flathead Reservation. Although she had little formal schooling, she had impressive talent and determination and around 1912