The Columbia History of the American Novel

wrote the first draft of Cogewea. In 1914 she shared her manuscript with Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, a white man actively involved in championing Native American rights. McWhorter added some notes and quotations, did some editing, and tried to place the book for Humishu-ma. He did not succeed, perhaps because of World War I; and -280- then after the war he continued to make changes in the manuscript — but this time without telling Hum-ishu-ma. The book, as Alanna Kathleen Brown explains, now became the work of two people with two separate objectives. When the novel finally came out in 1927 McWhorter had so altered it that Hum- ishu-ma wrote to him: 'I feel like it was someone elses book and not mine at all. In fact the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it.'

Hum-ishu-ma wrote Cogewea at night after exhausting labor all day as a migrant farmworker; she trusted McWhorter with her manuscript; and her reward was a book she could barely recognize as her own. As Dexter Fisher points out, McWhorter no doubt meant well. He wanted to revise Cogewea to make it more timely, impressive, and therefore marketable. Nevertheless what he did was to appropriate and rewrite Hum-ishu-ma — transform her work into his image of what it should be. He repeated on the personal level precisely the process of colonization and erasure that he claimed as an advocate of Native American issues to be fighting against in white culture.

Despite the manuscript's violation, it seems possible to identify the basic plot and design of Cogewea as Hum-ishu-ma's. The book has in its foreground a simple if tangled love-plot. Rejecting a young man who, like herself, comes from a mixed Okanogan and Anglo background and is therefore at home in both the Native American and the white world, Cogewea runs away with a white man who turns out to be a racist liar. When he abandons her, it is actually a good thing. Cogewea returns to her people and, most important, to new respect for her grandmother, her Stemteema, who had warned her against the white man. Quite overtly, Cogewea is a cautionary tale about the dangers of trusting white men and leaving the world of one's grandmother. It is, ironically, almost uncannily prophetic about Hum- ishuma's experience as a writer.

It may be that Hum-ishu-ma's struggle as a writer against colonial domination and particularly white sexism shows up most powerfully in Cogewea's form. Three times she inserts the Stemteema's traditional, cautionary tales into her conventional Western plot design. These tales, either remembered by Hum-ishu-ma or gathered by her for the novel, thus interject into the book a traditional, oral narrative that both opposes and interacts with the love-plot. Consequently the -281- form of Hum- ishu-ma's book, probably even more than its content, articulates what was obviously a fundamental issue for her as a woman writer, at least in this work. How does one fuse the modern Western novel — whether popular or high-art — and the traditional art of generations of Native American foremothers? Is it possible, or even desirable? Can the two meet, interact, coexist, or connect in the same text?

After Cogewea Hum-ishu-ma published Coyote Stories (1933), a collection of traditional Okanogan tales. Also, it is reported that she was determined to write another novel, this time without anyone's 'help.' Whether she did so is uncertain, however, as no manuscript has been found.

Certainly the careers of Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, Onoto Watanna, Willa Cather, and Hum-ishu-ma suggest no unitary story or pattern. Rather, what a sketch of representative women novelists' ambitions and fates at the turn of the century indicates is both how feasible and how very difficult it was for different women to become novelists in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

They all had behind them a strong tradition. By the end of the nineteenth century American women had been publishing novels for well over fifty years. Led by writers such as E. D. E. N. Southworth and Susan Warner, a number of them had succeeded so phenomenally that the popular novel in the 1850s was dominated by white women. Following the Civil War, other white women such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Sarah Orne Jewett published novels that significantly altered the earlier pattern. They wrote books that simultaneously sold well and attracted praise as 'art,' thus preparing the way, it can be said, for the explosion of talent and achievement among women novelists at the end of the century. Earlier there had been isolated women such as Elizabeth Stoddard or Harriet E. Wilson who had attempted novels substantially or even completely different from those produced by the popular white domestic novelists. But it was not until the third quarter of the nineteenth century that such experimentation and individuality became the norm rather than the exception.

Empowered by various, vigorous women's movements, as well as by various literary traditions that included autobiographies, poetry, -282- slave narratives, travel literature, and a number of oral forms in addition to the novel, women writers from many backgrounds turned with increasing ambition and confidence at the end of the nineteenth century to the novel, whether as high art or as popular fiction. African American women such as Frances Ellen Harper, Emma Dunham Kelley, Amelia Johnson, and Pauline Hopkins brought out novels in the 1890s and the first years of the new century. Onoto Watanna and Hum-ishu-ma likewise began novel-writing careers at the turn of the century. Many white women such as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton, Ellen Glasgow, Zona Gale, and Mary Roberts Rinehart began their careers as novelists at the end of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, as a group white women novelists were so successful that their work clearly threatened white men at the time. Theodore Dreiser's beginning his own career with two novels about women, Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1912), or Sinclair Lewis's debut with Main Street (1919) suggests how aware they were of the feminine market. Even more telling, the exaggeratedly muscular novels of men such as Richard Harding Davis, Frank Norris, Winston Churchill, and Harold Bell Wright point at least in part to their anxiety not simply about virility in general but specifically about gender and the novel — who should be shaping it and what it should look like.

A second and equally if not more important conclusion to draw from any overview of women novelists at the turn into the twentieth century is that gender cannot be separated out from race, ethnicity, and class when thinking about the struggles and accomplishments of women writers in the United States. As women, all of the writers I have mentioned shared the challenge of having to combat sexism and misogyny in order to write and publish. Also all, in one way or another, benefited from changing attitudes toward women in the broader social and political context. However, the differences among and for women created by racism, colonialism, cultural bigotry, and class discrimination often reduced to insignificance the similarities produced by gender. Edith Wharton's publication of seventeen novels and Hum-ishu-ma's publication of one — which she could barely recognize as her own by the time her benevolent white 'friend' got through with it — indicate how inextricable the issues of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and culture are in United States literary history. The -283- subject of gender empowerment and the American novel does not exist independent of questions of race, class, and culture.

Elizabeth Ammons

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Popular Forms I

The only men, as a class, in America today, who are able to live by pure literary labor, are the writers of what you call 'dime novels,' that is to say, of books written for the largest possible market in this country…. Had Poe lived in these days he would have been a writer of dime novels; for his prose stories have all the qualities which are required in a good 'dime.' Had he done so, he might have ended his days in comfort, instead of dying in misery, for good dime work pays well. - Frederick Whittaker, Dime Novels: A Defense by a Writer of Them (1884)

When Frederick Whittaker mounted his defense of cheap fiction in the late nineteenth century, he was reacting against criticism of it as a degenerate, corrupt, and corrupting form. His tactic was to legitimize the processes of authorship and reception (or literary production and consumption) within the marketplace. The argument and counterargument nicely gesture to the warring definitions, theories, and assumptions that inform discourse of the 'popular' in the industrial age. Disentangling the terms of that discourse is crucial, because each leads to a different construction of the literature. I will argue in this chapter that popular or mass literature of the nineteenth century made available to authors and readers a negotiated response to historical,