The Columbia History of the American Novel

married to Beadle's chief editor but also because her Maum Guinea and Her Plantation 'Children'; or, Holiday-week on a Louisiana Estate, a Slave Romance (1861) is an imitation of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin that can stand alongside Seth Jones in literary historical significance; and her detective novel The Dead Letter(which appeared in Beadle's Monthly in 1866) is the first known detective story by a woman. Street and Smith also worked to produce an identifiably female genre with their 'Bertha M. Clay' stories, first in the late 1870s, when New York Weekly pirated stories of Charlotte M. Braeme, a European author, under that name, and then in their dime series as a house pseudonym. In fact, Street and Smith used their regular stable of male authors — including William Wallace Cook — to produce these stories. There was no doubt, however, that they were designed to appropriate female ideology: Cook understood that he had been directed to write 'a bit of sentimental fiction for young women.'

This attempt to imitate the success of domestic women's fiction of the 1850s reaped massive rewards only once the formula was fitted to the changing social patterns of urbanizing America, toward the end of the century. Laura Jean Libbey became the stellar author of sensationalized stories set in the city, revolving around the trials, temptations, and romances of young working women. These novels were serialized in the Munroes' Fireside Companion and Family Story Paper in the 1880s and 1890s before being reprinted innumerable times by cheap publishers up to the 1920s. Accumulatively, they garnered such a huge audience that they won trademark status: in 1910, -297- The Bookman labeled the genre of working-girl romances 'Laura Jean Libbeys.' Libbey's formulaic plot revolved around a poor factory operative, shopgirl, or mill worker who manages to resist the unwelcome advances of the wealthy, upper-class villain, yet is often forced — unwittingly — into an illegal marriage with him, and finally ends the novel marrying an upper-class hero who admires her for her personal virtues that transcend her humble background. Although this formula privileges sentimentalism and romanticism, it is distinctly different from the mid-century domestic novel and from the post- Civil War novel of female religious zeal (for example, Augusta Jane Evans's St. Elmo [1868], the sine qua non of the type). Libbey sloughs off religiosity and focuses away from the middle-class domestic sphere, to follow the romantic dramas of the proletarian heroine in paid employment. (Her tales are also different from those by Horatio Alger, the other prolific formulist of the city in that period, partly because sexual passion rather than juvenile adventure is central to her treatment.)

In many ways, these novels are celebrations of working women, though that impression is complicated by the heroine's removal at the end of the novel to a wealthy domestic sphere and by the frequent revelation that the working girl was, unbeknownst to herself, a lost heiress. Critics have read these plots to different allegorical effect, some arguing that they told working-class readers that they could be both workers and heroines, others arguing that the endings betray and trivialize workers. In general, however, these plots clearly speak to the changes in women's status between about 1870 and 1920. More and more women were joining the work force, often with lowpaying factory jobs, and considerable concern was being voiced about the effect of public employment on young women's virtue; in such a climate, the very figuring of the working girl as democratic heroine, her entry into a popular pantheon that included such nationalistically approved types as the hunter, the detective, and the honest mechanic, signaled some level of legitimacy. Fiction that heroized women outside the domestic sphere offered working-class women some kind of accommodation and justification, some means of negotiating the transition from private to public.

The messages of all these dime narratives are complicated not only -298- by the relationship between formula and social agency but by the inscriptions of authorial voices in the texts. The Beadle and Adams authors forged a facsimile of a storyteller's relationship with their audience by talking to their readers about the commercial paraphernalia of the dime novel. In their earliest form, these tactics are familiar though exaggerated versions of inscriptions in the antebellum story papers. Buntline, for example, mounted a running commentary on his place in the production line, within his repetitive dime tales of captivity, chase, and rescue on the frontier, acknowledging the competitive commercialism of his task as author. Prentiss Ingraham and Edward Ellis implicated authors, characters, and readers in codes, conventions, and sign-systems, thus moving the fiction closer to an acknowledgment of its status in the publishing field. Edward Wheeler's characters completed the last refinement, by becoming independent of their author to the extent that they wrote their own plots, devised their own identities, and fought their own publishing battles. For example, just at the time that Street and Smith marketed an imitation of the Deadwood Dick series, Wheeler had his hero declare: 'I see that counterfeits are being shoved on the market — that is, sham Deadwood Dicks. We have one here in Eureka…. I wish to meet this chap and learn where he obtained the right to use my copyrighted handle?' The voice that recognizes the rules of the marketplace and the systematic interchange between producer and the consumer now belonged to the characters. The shift in rhetorical power is a textual illustration of the diminution of authorial power, just around the time when authors were losing more of their autonomy in the publishing hierarchy. Libbey's tactic was rather different: she too recognized her readers, partly by representing them and constructing their responses in her fiction. In Leonie Locke; or, The Romance of a Beautiful New York Working-Girl (1884), for example, she wrote:

Many a working-girl read the story of Leonie Locke, and their honest hearts thrilled as they read the story of her struggle against adverse fate. She had been a working-girl like themselves; she had known all their privations, the early rising, hurried toilet and hurrying steps to the work-shop. She had known what it was to toil late and early for the sweet bread of life, and she had known all their sorrows and the pitiful desolation and fear of being discharged from work. -299-

Libbey also maintained a strong authorial voice, but one reserved to the prefaces and advice columns that accompanied her fiction. Speaking in her own voice, she tempered her fantasies with comments on the harsh realities of urban life and contemporary gender relations, warning her young female readers about advances by men above them in social status. In different ways, these male and female narratives sustain a double vision, constructing formulaic fantasies accompanied by a demonstration of the realities, commercial and otherwise, supporting and implicitly critiquing these fictions.

Under the heavy hand of Street and Smith, these authorial gestures disappear, usurped by the publishers, who talk directly to the audience themselves. In juvenile nickel series, an editorial voice at the end of the story comments on the construction of the fiction, encourages readers to distribute it for financial rewards, and, in time, invites the audience to participate in its composition. The most emphatic example of this process occurred in the letters pages of Rough Rider Weekly; in response to conflicting advice from readers about whether Ted Strong, the hero, should or should not marry Stella, the heroine, the editor threw open the author's study and invited all the readers in: 'So you think Ted and Stella should marry? What do the rest of our readers think about it?…There are two sides to this question, and we should like to have it decided by our readers.' The fiction has become an overt bargaining tool between publisher and public; the only role left to the author was to carry out the audience's demands. It is the logical conclusion of the rhetoric initiated by the early story papers.

Reconstructing readers' responses to these authorial and narrative signs is even more problematic than classifying audience demographics. Some hypotheses have been constructed about the extent to which authorial resistance to the production line was matched by readers' responses, by scholars piecing together evidence from a patchwork of autobiographies, diaries, and reports by social reformers. The evidence suggests that male and female workers, at least, read dime fictions in ideologically charged ways. Denning argues that workers read cheap novels allegorically or typologically, interpreting a range of scenarios as microcosms of their social world. Thus, especially at times of industrial agitation and strikes in the late nineteenth century, workers could read the triumph of labor in stories of -300- Western outlaws — such as Edward Wheeler's Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills (1877) — as much as in those of honest mechanics exposing corrupt capitalists — in, for example, Frederick Whittaker's Larry Locke, the Man of Iron; or, A Fight for Fortune. A Story of Labor and Capital (1883-84). Similarly, working girls seem to have fashioned their fantasies toward self-empowerment. Dorothy Richardson's 1905 autobiography, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, along with Joyce Shaw Peterson's analysis of it, suggests that women workers read Libbey as encoding their public situations, by dignifying labor and acknowledging the harshness of their city lives, yet also offering them visions of survival and transcendence that gave them private sustenance. It can also be argued that the ways in which these women shared and constructed community around their reading signal their appropriation of these commercial productions into their own culture.