1865-1914Overview of American Literature, 1865–1914 from Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Edited by Nina Baym, et al.TH E TRA N S FO RM AT ION O F A N AT ION

The Civil War, and the enormous devastation and loss of life it caused, left the United States morally exhausted at its conclusion. At the same time, the war stimulated innovations that helped the country prosper materially for the next five decades.

The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 with the use of poorly paid laborers from China. The railroad made it possible for people and goods to cross the country quickly and inexpensively, thereby moving the American economy into the industrial age.

The telegraph, electricity, and the telephone began to revolutionize daily life. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893 that the Western frontier no

longer existed as a “frontier,” but was instead settled. He set forth the theory that the frontier was crucial to American dynamism and to the formation of a distinctive, democratic American identity. 

Eager to compete with European nations, the United States sought to expand its influence and land holdings beyond its continental borders, engaging in conflicts in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii.

American expansionism continued to impinge on the rights and cultures of Native American peoples as U.S. government policies forced them off their traditional lands. By the late nineteenth century, well-meaning but misguided white philanthropists began agitating for the assimilation of Native Americans into the white mainstream by imposing white schooling, white patterns of town settlement and agriculture, and white religion.

Industrialization and manufacturing on an unprecedented scale emerged in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. 

Major industries were consolidated into monopolies, allowing a small number of men to control enormously profitable enterprises in steel, oil, railroads, meatpacking, banking, and finance. Called “robber barons” by some and celebrated as captains of industry by others, these men squeezed out competitors and accumulated vast wealth and power.

Immigration exploded between 1870 and 1920, especially with the arrival of millions of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Immigrants often settled in urban centers, increasing the relative populations of cities versus rural areas in the United States. 

Rural farmers cultivating traditional family-run operations found it difficult to compete as railroads and land speculators drove up the price of land. Large-scale farming soon took over from the family farm, increasing agricultural yields but displacing many farmers.

Industrial workers received low wages, labored in inhumane and dangerous conditions, and had few legal protections regulating safety and working hours.

Neither farmers nor urban laborers organized effectively to protect their own interests.

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TH E LIT ERA RY M A RKE TP LA CE Rapid transcontinental settlement and changing urban industrial conditions introduced

new themes, new forms, new subjects, new characters, new regions, and new authors in the half century following the Civil War.

The numbers, circulation, and influence of newspapers and magazines grew in this period. Many of the noted authors of the era started as newspaper journalists and/or published in magazines.

American writers of this period increasingly adopted the form of realism in their fiction. Critically praised writers such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton used literary realism to different effect and to address different concerns, though all were interested in constructing distinctively American protagonists.

Though the focus of the era was mostly on prose fiction, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson wrote important poetry in this period.

F ORM S OF REA LIS M AN D NA TU RA LIS M The term “realism” refers to a movement in English, European, and American literature

that emphasized the “truthful treatment of material,” as William Dean Howells put it. Most realist fiction focused on the observable surfaces of the world in which fictional characters lived, and strove to make those surfaces seem lifelike to readers.

Some realist writers strove to represent the experiences of poor or outsider characters, while others emphasized the interior moral and psychological lives of elite, wealthy characters.

“Naturalism” can be thought of as a version of realism or as an alternative to it. Literary naturalists, unlike the realists, for whom human beings defined themselves within recognizable settings, wrote about human life as it was shaped by forces beyond human control.

Naturalism often introduced characters from the fringes and depths of society whose lives spin out of control. Naturalists wanted to explore how biology, environment, and other natural forces shaped lives—particularly the lives of lower-class people.

Naturalist writers thought of their work as scientific in its exploration of deterministic effects—and thus truly realistic—rather than romantic.

REG ION A L WRIT ING Another expression of the realist impulse, regional writing arose out of the desire both

to record distinctive ways of life and to come to terms with the new world that seemed to be replacing earlier, regional ways of life. “Local colorists” were dedicated to capturing the natural, social, and linguistic features of particular regions.

Many women writers initially associated with regionalism expanded their interests to write more broadly about the world of women.

Native American writers described their lives and traditions, especially as these were imperiled by white advances into their territories. In so doing, they widened public appreciation of literary models outside the European tradition while also challenging the dominant culture’s identification of the West with the imaginary line of the frontier.

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REA LIS M AS A RGU M EN T Realism in fiction was an important spur to the development of nonfiction, which

described, analyzed, and critiqued the social, economic, and political institutions that emerged between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I.

Nonfiction writers penned articles and books on such topics as women’s rights, political corruption, the degradation of the natural world, economic inequity, business deceptions, the exploitation of labor, and tenement housing.

Of all the issues of the day, perhaps the most persistent and resistant to solution was racial inequality.

The end of Reconstruction in 1877 saw the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern states and the shift to segregationist Jim Crow laws following the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Black Americans saw a considerable erosion of the Constitutional amendments that had promised to guarantee their civil rights.

Among the many African American writers addressing issues of black community and racial inequity, W. E. B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington emerged as important advocates of different strategies to hasten equality for blacks in the United States. Du Bois largely rejected Washington’s more conciliatory and assimilating approach.

Realism and Naturalism

definitions from A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams

Realism and Naturalism. Realism is used by literary critics in two chief ways: (1) to identify a literary movement of the nineteenth century, especially in prose fiction (beginning with Balzac in France, George Eliot in England, and William Dean Howells in America); and (2) to designate a recurrent mode, in various eras, of representing human life and experience in literature, which was especially exemplified by the writers of this historical movement.

Realistic fiction is often opposed to romantic fiction: the romance is said to present life as we would have it be, more picturesque, more adventurous, more heroic than the actual; realism, to present an accurate imitation of life as it is. This distinction is not invalid, but it is inadequate. Casanova, T. E. Lawrence, and Winston Churchill were people in real life, but their histories, as related by themselves or others, demonstrate that truth can be stranger than literary realism. The typical realist sets out to write a fiction which will give the illusion that it reflects life and the social world as it seems to the common reader. To achieve this effect the author prefers as protagonist an ordinary citizen of Middletown, living on Main Street, perhaps, and engaged in the real estate business. The realist, in other words, is deliberately selective in material and prefers the average, the commonplace, and the everyday over the rarer aspects of the social

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scene. The characters, therefore, are usually of the middle class or (less frequently) the working class-people without highly exceptional endowments, who live through ordinary experiences of

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childhood, adolescence, love, marriage, parenthood, infidelity, and death; who find life rather dull and often unhappy, though it may be brightened by touches of beauty and joy; but who may, under special circumstances, display something akin to heroism.

A thoroughgoing realism involves not only a selection of subject matter but, more important, a special literary manner as well: the subject is represented, or "rendered," in such a way as to give the reader the illusion of actual and ordinary experience. (Structuralist critics claim that the techniques used by a realistic author are in fact purely literary conventions and codes which the reader interprets, or naturalizes, so as to make the work seem a reflection of everyday reality.) Daniel Defoe, the first novelistic realist in the early eighteenth century, dealt with the extraordinary adventures of a shipwrecked mariner named Robinson Crusoe and with the extraordinary misadventures of Moll Flanders; but these novels are made to seem to the reader a mirror held up to real life by Defoe's reportorial manner of rendering the events, whether trivial or extraordinary, in a circumstantial, matter-of-fact, and seemingly unselective way.

In the broad sense of the term, authors of highly wrought prose fiction such as Fielding, Jane Austen, Balzac, George Eliot, and Tolstoy are realists, for they often render ordinary people and settings so richly and persuasively that they convince us that men and women really lived, talked, and acted in the way that they depict. Some critics, however, use the term "realist" more narrowly for writers who render a subject so as to make it seem a reflection of the casual order of experience, without too patently shaping it into a tightly wrought comic or ironic or tragic pattern (see plot). In this narrower sense, "realism" is applied more exclusively to works such as William Dean Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Arnold Bennet's novels about the "Five Towns" (1902 and following), and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (1920). See also magic realism.

Naturalism is sometimes claimed to be an even more accurate picture of life than is realism. But naturalism is not only, like realism, a special selection of subject matter and a special literary manner; it is a mode of fiction that was developed by a school of writers in accordance with a particular philosophical thesis.

This thesis, a product of post-Darwinian biology in the mid-nineteenth century, held that a human being belongs entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul or any other mode of participation in a religious or spiritual world beyond nature; that such a being is therefore merely a higher-order animal whose character and fortunes are determined by two kinds of forces, heredity and environment. A person inherits personal traits and compulsive instincts, especially hunger, the accumulative drive, and sex, and is then subject to the social and economic forces in the family, the class, and the milieu into which that person is born. The French novelist Emile Zola, beginning in the 1870s, did much to develop this theory in what he called "le roman experimental (that is, the novel organized in the mode of a scientific experiment). Zola and later naturalistic writers, such as the Americans Frank Norris, Stephen Crane,

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Theodore Dreiser, and James Farrell, try to present their subjects with an objective scientific attitude and with elaborate documentation, sometimes including an almost medical frankness about activities and bodily functions usually unmentioned in earlier literature. They tend to

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choose characters who exhibit strong animal drives such as greed and sexual desire, and who are victims both of their glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without. The end of the naturalistic novel is usually "tragic," but not, as in classical and Elizabethan tragedy, because of a heroic but losing struggle of the individual mind and will against gods, enemies, and circumstance. Instead the protagonist of the naturalistic plot, a pawn to multiple compulsions, usually disintegrates, or is wiped out.

Aspects of the naturalistic selection and management of materials and its austere or harsh frankness of manner are apparent in many modern novels and dramas, such as Hardy's Jude the Obscure, 1895 (although Hardy largely substituted a cosmic determinism for biological and environmental determinism), various plays of Eugene O'Neill in the 1920s, and Norman Mailer's novel of World War 11, The Naked and the Dead. An enlightening exercise is to distinguish how the relation between the sexes is represented in a romance (Richard Blackmore's Lorna Doone, 1869), an ironic comedy of manners (Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, 1813), a realistic novel (William Dean Howells' A Modern Instance, 1882), and a naturalistic novel (Emile Zola's Nana, 1880, or Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, 1925). Movements originally opposed both to realism and naturalism (though some modern works, such as Joyce's Ulysses, 1922, combine aspects of all these novelistic modes) are expressionism and symbolism (see Symbolist Movement).

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras CountyMark Twain- 1865

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it certainly succeeded.

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the old, dilapidated tavern in the ancient mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up and gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel's Camp. I added that, if Mr. Wheeler could tell me any thing about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him.

Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat me down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned the initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through

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the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was any thing ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling, was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once:

There was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49 or may be it was the spring of '50 I don't recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume wasn't finished when he first came to the camp; but any way, he was the curiosest man about always betting on any thing that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't, he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit him any way just so's he got a bet, he was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner. He was always ready and laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solittry thing mentioned but that feller'd offer to bet on it, and -take any side you please, as I was just telling you. If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush, or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar, to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a good man. If he even seen a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell you about him. Why, it never made no difference to him he would bet on any thing the dangdest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn's going to save her; but one morning he come in, and Smiley asked how she was, and he said she was considerable better thank the Lord for his inftnit mercy and coming on so smart that, with the blessing of Providence, she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, "Well, I'll risk two- and-a-half that she don't, any way."

Thish-yer Smiley had a mare the boys called her the fifteen- minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because, of course, she was faster than that and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag-end of the race she'd get excited and desperate- like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust, and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.

And he had a little small bull pup, that to look at him you'd think he wan's worth a cent, but to set around and look ornery, and lay for a chance to steal something. But as soon as money was up on him, he was a different dog; his underjaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover, and shine savage like the furnaces. And a dog might tackle him, and bully- rag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson which was the name of the pup Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else and the bets being doubled and doubled

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on the other side all the time, till the money was all up; and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int of his hind leg and freeze on it not chew, you understand, but only jest grip and hang on till they thronged up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off by a circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet bolt, he saw in a minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he 'peered sur- prised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind legs for him to take bolt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him, and he had genius I know it, because he hadn't had no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances, if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out.

Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tom- cats, and all of them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of catching flies, and kept him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as far as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most any thing and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this floor Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog and sing out, "Flies, Dan'l, flies!" and quicker'n you could wink, he'd spring straight up, and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the floor again as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightforward as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been everywheres, all said he laid over any frog that ever they see.

Well, Smiley kept the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him down town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller a stranger in the camp, he was come across him with his box, and says:

"What might it be that you've got in the box?"And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, "It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary,

may be, but it an't it's only just a frog."And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and

says, "H'm so 'tis. Well, what's he good for?""Well," Smiley says, easy and careless, "He's good enough for one thing, I should judge

he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county."

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The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

"May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand frogs, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may be you an't only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county."

And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I an't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you."

And then Smiley says, "That's all right that's all right if you'll hold my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog." And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to wait.

So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a tea- spoon and filled him full of quail shot filled him pretty near up to his chin and set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and says:

"Now, if you're ready, set him alongside of Dan'l, with his fore- paws just even with Dan'l, and I'll give the word." Then he says, "One two three jump!" and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off, but Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders so like a Frenchman, but it wan's no use he couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as an anvil, and he couldn't no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was, of course.

The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulders this way at Dan'l, and says again, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long time, and at last he says, "I do wonder what in the nation that frog throw'd off for I wonder if there an't something the matter with him he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow." And he ketched Dan'l by the nap of the neck, and lifted him up and says, "Why, blame my cats, if he don't weigh five pound!" and turned him upside down, and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketchd him. And-

[Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.] And turning to me as he moved away, he said: "Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy I an't going to be gone a second."

But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started away.

At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he button- holed me and recommenced:

"Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yeller one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail, only jest a short stump like a bannanner, and "

"Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!" I muttered, good-naturedly, and bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.

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The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)Charlotte Perkins Gilman

        It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.        A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity--but that would be asking too much of fate!        Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.        Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?        John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.        John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.        John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.        You see he does not believe I am sick!        And what can one do?        If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency-- what is one to do?        My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.        So I take phosphates or phosphites--whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.        Personally, I disagree with their ideas.        Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.        But what is one to do?        I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal--having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.        I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus--but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.        So I will let it alone and talk about the house.        The most beautiful place! It is quite alone standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.        There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden--large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.        There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.        There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years.        That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care--there is something strange about the house--I can feel it.        I even said so to John one moonlight evening but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut

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the window.        I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.        But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself-- before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.        I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.        He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.        He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.        I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.        He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. "Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time. ' So we took the nursery at the top of the house.        It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.        The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off--the paper in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.        One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.        It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.        The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.        It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.        No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.        There comes John, and I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a word.

----------        We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.        I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.        John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.        I am glad my case is not serious!        But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.        John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.        Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!        I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!        Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,--to dress and entertain,

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and order things.        It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!        And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.        I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!        At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.        He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.        "You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental."        "Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."        Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.        But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.        It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.        I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.        Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.        Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.        I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.        But I find I get pretty tired when I try.        It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.        I wish I could get well faster.        But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!        There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.        I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.        I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.        I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.

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        I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.        The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.        The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother--they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.        Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.        But I don't mind it a bit--only the paper.        There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.        She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!        But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.        There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.        This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a, different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.        But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.        There's sister on the stairs!

----------        Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are all gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.        Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.        But it tired me all the same.        John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.        But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!        Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.        I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.        I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.        Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.        And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.        So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal.        I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps because of the wall-paper.        It dwells in my mind so!        I lie here on this great immovable bed--it is nailed down, I believe--and follow that pattern

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about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.        I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.        It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.        Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.        But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.        The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.        They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.        There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,--the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.        It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.

----------        I don't know why I should write this.        I don't want to.        I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way--it is such a relief!        But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.        Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.        John says I mustn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.        Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.        But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished .        It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.        And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.        He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.        He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.        There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.        If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.

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        I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.        Of course I never mention it to them any more--I am too wise,--but I keep watch of it all the same.        There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.        Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.        It is always the same shape, only very numerous.        And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder--I begin to think--I wish John would take me away from here!

----------        It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.        But I tried it last night.        It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.        I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.        John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wall-paper till I felt creepy.        The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.        I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back John was awake.        "What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that--you'll get cold."        I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he would take me away.        "Why darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before.        "The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you."        "I don't weigh a bit more," said 1, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away!"        "Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"        "And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.        "Why, how can 1, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!"        "Better in body perhaps--" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.        "My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"        So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately.

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----------        On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.        The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.        You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.        The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions--why, that is something like it.        That is, sometimes!        There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.        When the sun shoots in through the east window--I always watch for that first long, straight ray--it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.        That is why I watch it always.        By moonlight--the moon shines in all night when there is a moon--I wouldn't know it was the same paper.        At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.        I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.        By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.        I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.        Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.        It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.        And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake--O no!        The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.        He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.        It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,--that perhaps it is the paper!        I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once.        She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper--she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry-- asked me why I should frighten her so!        Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!        Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!

----------        Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.

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John is so pleased to see me improve ! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper.        I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall-paper--he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.        I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough.

----------        I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.        In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.        There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.        It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw--not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.        But there is something else about that paper-- the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.        It creeps all over the house.        I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.        It gets into my hair.        Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it--there is that smell!        Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.        It is not bad--at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.        In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.        It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house--to reach the smell.        But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell.        There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over.        I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round--round and round and round--it makes me dizzy!

----------        I really have discovered something at last.        Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.        The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!        Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.        Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.        And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.        They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and

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makes their eyes white!        If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

----------        I think that woman gets out in the daytime!        And I'll tell you why--privately--I've seen her!        I can see her out of every one of my windows!        It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.        I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.        I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!        I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once.        And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.        I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.        But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.        And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!        I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

----------        If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.        I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much.        There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his eyes.        And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give.        She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.        John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!        He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.        As if I couldn't see through him!        Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.        It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.

----------        Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John to stay in town over night, and won't be out until this evening.        Jennie wanted to sleep with me--the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.        That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.        I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.        A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.        And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would

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finish it to-day!        We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before.        Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.        She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.        How she betrayed herself that time!        But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me,--not alive !        She tried to get me out of the room--it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner--I would call when I woke.        So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.        We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow.        I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.        How those children did tear about here!        This bedstead is fairly gnawed!        But I must get to work.        I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.        I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.        I want to astonish him.        I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!        But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!        This bed will not move!        I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner--but it hurt my teeth.        Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!        I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.        Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.        I don't like to look out of the windows even-- there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.        I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?        But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope--you don't get me out in the road there !        I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!        It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!        I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.        For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.        But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.        Why there's John at the door!

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        It is no use, young man, you can't open it!        How he does call and pound!        Now he's crying for an axe.        It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!        "John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"        That silenced him for a few moments.        Then he said--very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"        "I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"        And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.        "What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"        I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.        "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"        Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)Stephen Crane

Chapter IA very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was

throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.

His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.

"Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley child."Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me run."Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil's Row throats. Tattered gamins on the right

made a furious assault on the gravel heap. On their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.

The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other side. His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon.

On the ground, children from Devil's Row closed in on their antagonist. He crooked his left arm defensively about his head and fought with cursing fury. The little boys ran to and fro, dodging, hurling stones and swearing in barbaric trebles.

From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman. Some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and regarded the fight. The engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a railing and watched. Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a building and crawled slowly along the river's bank.

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A stone had smashed into Jimmie's mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. His roaring curses of the first part of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter.

In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil's Row children there were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. The little boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood upon the other child's face.

Down the avenue came boastfully sauntering a lad of sixteen years, although the chronic sneer of an ideal manhood already sat upon his lips. His hat was tipped with an air of challenge over his eye. Between his teeth, a cigar stump was tilted at the angle of defiance. He walked with a certain swing of the shoulders which appalled the timid. He glanced over into the vacant lot in which the little raving boys from Devil's Row seethed about the shrieking and tearful child from Rum Alley.

"Gee!" he murmured with interest. "A scrap. Gee!"He strode over to the cursing circle, swinging his shoulders in a manner which denoted

that he held victory in his fists. He approached at the back of one of the most deeply engaged of the Devil's Row children.

"Ah, what deh hell," he said, and smote the deeply-engaged one on the back of the head. The little boy fell to the ground and gave a hoarse, tremendous howl. He scrambled to his feet, and perceiving, evidently, the size of his assailant, ran quickly off, shouting alarms. The entire Devil's Row party followed him. They came to a stand a short distance away and yelled taunting oaths at the boy with the chronic sneer. The latter, momentarily, paid no attention to them.

"What deh hell, Jimmie?" he asked of the small champion.Jimmie wiped his blood-wet features with his sleeve."Well, it was dis way, Pete, see! I was goin' teh lick dat Riley kid and dey all pitched on

me."Some Rum Alley children now came forward. The party stood for a moment exchanging

vainglorious remarks with Devil's Row. A few stones were thrown at long distances, and words of challenge passed between small warriors. Then the Rum Alley contingent turned slowly in the direction of their home street. They began to give, each to each, distorted versions of the fight. Causes of retreat in particular cases were magnified. Blows dealt in the fight were enlarged to catapultian power, and stones thrown were alleged to have hurtled with infinite accuracy. Valor grew strong again, and the little boys began to swear with great spirit.

"Ah, we blokies kin lick deh hull damn Row," said a child, swaggering.Little Jimmie was striving to stanch the flow of blood from his cut lips. Scowling, he

turned upon the speaker."Ah, where deh hell was yeh when I was doin' all deh fightin?" he demanded. "Youse

kids makes me tired.""Ah, go ahn," replied the other argumentatively.Jimmie replied with heavy contempt. "Ah, youse can't fight, Blue Billie! I kin lick yeh

wid one han'.""Ah, go ahn," replied Billie again."Ah," said Jimmie threateningly."Ah," said the other in the same tone.They struck at each other, clinched, and rolled over on the cobble stones."Smash 'im, Jimmie, kick deh damn guts out of 'im," yelled Pete, the lad with the chronic

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sneer, in tones of delight.The small combatants pounded and kicked, scratched and tore. They began to weep and

their curses struggled in their throats with sobs. The other little boys clasped their hands and wriggled their legs in excitement. They formed a bobbing circle about the pair.

A tiny spectator was suddenly agitated."Cheese it, Jimmie, cheese it! Here comes yer fader," he yelled.The circle of little boys instantly parted. They drew away and waited in ecstatic awe for

that which was about to happen. The two little boys fighting in the modes of four thousand years ago, did not hear the warning.

Up the avenue there plodded slowly a man with sullen eyes. He was carrying a dinner pail and smoking an apple-wood pipe.

As he neared the spot where the little boys strove, he regarded them listlessly. But suddenly he roared an oath and advanced upon the rolling fighters.

"Here, you Jim, git up, now, while I belt yer life out, you damned disorderly brat."He began to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground. The boy Billie felt a heavy boot

strike his head. He made a furious effort and disentangled himself from Jimmie. He tottered away, damning.

Jimmie arose painfully from the ground and confronting his father, began to curse him. His parent kicked him. "Come home, now," he cried, "an' stop yer jawin', er I'll lam the everlasting head off yehs."

They departed. The man paced placidly along with the apple-wood emblem of serenity between his teeth. The boy followed a dozen feet in the rear. He swore luridly, for he felt that it was degradation for one who aimed to be some vague soldier, or a man of blood with a sort of sublime license, to be taken home by a father.

The Story of An Hour (1894)Kate Chopin

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

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She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under the breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering. Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for

admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."

"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

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She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills. 

1914-1945Overview of American Literature from Norton Anthology of American Literature. Edited by

Nina Baym, et al.

TH E TW O W ARS A S H IS TO RICA L M ARK ERS

The two world wars (World War I, 1914–1918, and World War II, 1939–1945) bracket a period during which the United States became a fully modern nation. Both wars mobilized the country’s industries and technologies, spurred their development, and uprooted citizens.

World War I left many Americans distrustful of international politics and committed to steering the nation back to prewar modes of life. Many were wary of the growing influence of socialist and Communist ideas, which they associated with labor unions and immigrant radicals. Congress enacted sweeping exclusionary immigration acts in 1924, radically curtailing the flow of immigrants into the country.

For other Americans, World War I ushered in more progressive forms of political and social life. Women and racial minorities gained some civil liberties and some new social freedoms during this period, though they still faced discrimination.

Political, social, and cultural life in the United States was transformed by the stock market crash of 1929, which led to an economic depression with a 25 percent unemployment rate. This economic catastrophe was known as the Great Depression.

The Great Depression did not fully end until the United States entered World War II in 1941. The war unified the country politically and revitalized industry and employment. The United States emerged from World War II as a major industrial and political power.

The literature of the modern period reflects the nation’s attempts to come to terms with the many meanings of modernity. Some writers celebrated modern developments while others lamented them. Most writers believed that old literary forms would not work for new times and were inspired by the possibility of creating something entirely new.

Writers of the period debated the uses of literary tradition. Some wanted to honor traditional forms and language and to include allusions to canonical works of the past. Others saw such homage as imitative or old-fashioned. Still others used literary

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tradition oppositionally—alluding to canonical literature ironically or fracturing traditional literary formulas.

Writers of the period also debated the place of popular culture in serious literature. Some embraced popular forms while others rejected them as cynical commercialism.

Another issue was the question of how far literature should engage itself in political and social struggle. Some felt that art should participate in the politics of the time, while others believed that art should remain a domain unto itself.

CHA N GIN G TIM ES

The 1920s saw ideological debates pitting adherents to small-town values such as the work ethic, social conformity, duty, and respectability against internationally minded radicals and affluent young people who argued for more diverse, permissive, and tolerant lifestyles.

The social codes governing sexual behavior became less restrictive. These social changes found their most influential theorist in Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, inventor of the practice of psychoanalysis and an important developer of the concept of the “unconscious.”

Women gained the right to vote in 1920 and found new freedoms in educational possibilities, professional opportunities, geographic mobility, and sexuality.

Around 1915, as a direct result of the industrial needs of World War I, job opportunities opened up for African Americans in the factories of the North. Many left the South for Northern cities in what came to be known as the “Great Migration.”

Even though African Americans faced racism, segregation, and racial violence in the North, a black American presence soon became powerfully visible in urban cultural life. The Harlem Renaissance—an outpouring of innovative cultural production by African Americans centered in Harlem, a neighborhood of New York City—was one manifestation of this development.

Class inequality generated intellectual and artistic debate during the modern period. Following the rise of the Soviet Union, the American left increasingly drew its intellectual and political program from the tenets of German philosopher Karl Marx, who located the roots of human behavior in economics and believed that industrialized societies were divided by an antagonistic relationship between capital and labor.

Americans who thought of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s were usually subjected to government surveillance, suspicion, and occasionally violence.

S CIEN CE A ND TE CHN O LO GY

Access to electricity, and to modern appliances designed to make communication and domestic work more efficient, expanded dramatically in American homes during the interwar years.

Devices for recording and playing music, the radio, and motion pictures brought mass popular culture into being.

Automobiles became affordable for more Americans and transformed ordinary people’s mobility, the structure of American industry, and national topography.

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Scientists during the interwar period made important discoveries about the size and shape of the universe, as well as the nature of time and space. The increased specialization of science as a discipline sometimes made these discoveries difficult for ordinary people to understand and led to rifts between literary intellectuals and scientists.

TH E 1930S

The Great Depression was not limited to the United States but was a worldwide phenomenon. It fostered social unrest that led to the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe.

Many Americans began to question the efficacy and justice of free-enterprise capitalism.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and instituted a “New Deal” designed to combat the Depression. He inaugurated liberal reforms such as social security, job creation acts, welfare, and unemployment insurance.

The dire economic situation in the United States produced a significant increase in Communist party membership among Americans during the 1930s. Many supporters of Communism later felt disillusioned and betrayed by the brutality of Soviet Communism under Josef Stalin. Some of these left-wing activists became staunch anti-Communists after World War II.

AM ERICA N VE RS ION S OF M OD ERN IS M

In literary contexts, the term “modernism” is a catchall for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that dealt with the modern world.

Literary critics often designate as “high modernism” work that represents the transformation of traditional society under the pressures of modernity and that breaks down traditional literary forms in doing so. Many high modernist texts interpret modernity as an experience of loss and represent the modern world as a scene of ruin.

As a movement, modernism involved many art forms and media, including sculpture, painting, dance, and music, as well as literature.

High modernist works are characterized by their construction out of fragments—fragments of myth or history, fragments of experience or perception, fragments of previous artistic work. For the modern artist or writer, the political, social, and aesthetic structures that had organized human experience previously no longer seemed viable in the modern world. Order, sequence, and unity did not seem to them to convey reality. Instead, they emphasized discontinuity, discordance, and fragmentation as more representative of the modern experience.

Modernist literature often conveys fragmentation through abrupt shifts in perspective, voice, and tone and through a reliance on sometimes obscure symbols and images rather than clear statements of meaning.

Some modernist literature draws on structures and fragments borrowed from earlier world literature, mythologies, and religions. For some writers, these references to earlier texts expressed profound truths. Other writers alluded to literary traditions ironically.

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Many modernist works are self-reflexive, or concerned with their own nature as art. In this way, they foreground the search for meaning and query the role of art and the perception of art in the production of meaning.

Faced with making sense of fragments and intuiting connections left unstated, the reader of a modernist work is often said to participate in the creative work of making the poem or story.

Despite their concern with involving the reader in the production of meaning, modernist literature reached only a limited audience. Many readers found it difficult to understand the meaning of these texts’ fragmentation and to parse their often obscure allusions to other texts or traditions.

Some major publishers sought out the works of modernist writers to publish alongside more conventional bestsellers. Many more modernist writers found publication in the so-called “little magazines,” which were magazines with very small circulations. The number of little magazines in the period was in the hundreds.

MO D ERN IS M A BRO AD A ND O N N A TIV E G ROU N DS

High modernism was a self-consciously international movement, and many of its leading American exponents lived as permanent or temporary expatriates in Europe. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot all left the United States permanently, while Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Claude McKay, Katherine Anne Porter, Nella Larsen, Robert Frost, and Eugene O’Neill, among others, spent significant periods of time abroad.

Modernist writers claimed to find climates more hospitable to artistic achievement and high culture in Europe, though they seldom thought of themselves as deserting their nation. Instead, they believed they were bringing the United States into the larger context of European culture. Many continued to write works that were overtly “American” in theme.

Regionalism continued to be an important force in American literature. An especially strong center of regional literary activity emerged in the South.

The history of race in the United States was central to the specifically national subject matter to which many American modernists remained committed.

The Harlem Renaissance brought African American writers like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston into particular prominence.

Women writers faced a backlash after their prominence in the nineteenth century. Some male modernist writers asserted their own seriousness by identifying women writers with the didactic, popular writing against which they rebelled. But women still emerged who associated themselves with the important literary trends of the era. Many of these writers concentrated on depictions of women characters or women’s thoughts and experiences, yet few labeled themselves feminists.

DRA M A

Although theatrical productions had been a part of American life since the eighteenth century, drama only emerged as a branch of contemporary literature—rather than a

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stepchild of popular entertainment—between 1910 and the latter part of the 1920s. It was at this point that drama began to conceive of itself as a literary form.

Innovations in American theater are often launched in reaction against the popular productions mounted on Broadway. Playwrights Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill were launched off Broadway.

Musical comedy emerged as a distinctively American dramatic form in the interwar period.

During the Depression, social criticism became an important dramatic theme, with political plays performed by many radical groups.

GrassCarl Sandburg 1878 - 1967

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work—                                           I am the grass; I cover all. 

And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:                                           What place is this?                                           Where are we now? 

                                          I am the grass.                                           Let me work.

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To A Friend Estranged From MeEdna St. Vincent Millay 1928

Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sunThat will not rise again.Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charityThat lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.

That this could be!That I should live to seeMost vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,So fitted out with purple robe and crownTo stand among his betters! Face to faceWith outraged me in this once holy place,Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and huntedTruth was harboured out of danger,He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger!

I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:The hills may shift, the waters may decline,Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,But never your love from me, your hand from mine.

Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dreamYou have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.

Indian Camp1924

Ernest Hemingway

    At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.    Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.    The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father's arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.    "Where are we going, Dad?" Nick asked.    "Over to the Indian camp. There is an Indian lady very sick."   "Oh," said Nick.

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    Across the bay they found the other boat beached. Uncle George was smoking a cigar in the dark. The young Indian pulled the boat way up on the beach. Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars.    They walked up from the beach through a meadow that was soaking wet with dew, following the young Indian who carried a lantern. Then they went into the woods and followed a trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills. It was much lighter on the logging road as the timber was cut away on both sides. The young Indian stopped and blew out his lantern and they all walled on along the road.    They came around a bend and a dog came out barking. Ahead were the lights of the shanties where the Indian bark-peelers lived. More dogs rushed out at them. The two Indians sent them back to the shanties. In the shanty nearest the road there was a light in the window. An old woman stood in the doorway holding a lamp.    Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman. She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her. The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made. She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty. She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt. Her head was turned to one side. In the upper bunk was her husband. He had cut his foot very badly with an ax three days before. He was smoking a pipe. The room smelled very bad.    Nick's father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.    "This lady is going to have a baby, Nick," he said.    "I know," said Nick.    "You don't know," said his father. "Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor. The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams."    "I see," Nick said.    Just then the woman cried out.    "Oh, Daddy, can't you give her something to make her stop screaming?" asked Nick.    "No. I haven't any anaesthetic," his father said. "But her screams are not important. I don't hear them because they are not important."    The husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall.    The woman in the kitchen motioned to the doctor that the water was hot. Nick's father went into the kitchen and poured about half of the water out of the big kettle into a basin. Into the water left in the kettle he put several things he unwrapped from a handkerchief.    "Those must boil," he said, and began to scrub his hands in the basin of hot water with a cake of soap he had brought from the camp. Nick watched his father's hands scrubbing each other with the soap. While his father washed his hands very carefully and thoroughly, he talked.    "You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first but sometimes they're not. When they're not they make a lot of trouble for everybody. Maybe I'll have to operate on this lady. We'll know in a little while."    When he was satisfied with his hands he went in and went to work.    "Pull back that quilt, will you, George?" he said. "I'd rather not touch it."    Later when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, "Damn squaw bitch!" and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him. Nick held the basin for his father. It all took a

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long time.    His father picked the baby up and slapped it to make it breathe and handed it to the old woman.    "See, it's a boy, Nick," he said. "How do you like being an interne?"    Nick said. "All right." He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing.    "There. That gets it," said his father and put something into the basin.    Nick didn't look at it.    "Now," his father said, "there's some stitches to put in. You can watch this or not, Nick, just as you like. I'm going to sew up the incision I made."    Nick did not watch. His curiosity had been gone for a long time.    His father finished and stood up. Uncle George and the three Indian men stood up. Nick put the basin out in the kitchen.    Uncle George looked at his arm. The young Indian smiled reminiscently.    "I'll put some peroxide on that, George," the doctor said.    He bent over the Indian woman. She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. She did not know what had become of the baby or anything.    "I'll be back in the morning." the doctor said, standing up.    "The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she'll bring everything we need."    He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.    "That's one for the medical journal, George," he said. "Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders."    Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.    "Oh, you're a great man, all right," he said.    "Ought to have a look at the proud father. They're usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs," the doctor said. "I must say he took it all pretty quietly."    He pulled back the blanket from the Indian's head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.    "Take Nick out of the shanty, George," the doctor said.    There was no need of that. Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian's head back.    It was just beginning to be daylight when they walked along the logging road back toward the lake.    "I'm terribly sorry I brought you along; Nickie," said his father, all his post-operative exhilaration gone. "It was an awful mess to put you through."    "Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?" Nick asked.    "No, that was very, very exceptional."    "Why did he kill himself, Daddy?"    "I don't know, Nick. He couldn't stand things, I guess."    "Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"    "Not very many, Nick."    "Do many women?"    "Hardly ever."    "Don't they ever?"

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    "Oh, yes. They do sometimes."    "Daddy?"    "Yes."    "Where did Uncle George go?"    "He'll turn up all right."    "Is dying hard, Daddy?"    "No, I think it's pretty easy, Nick. It all depends."    They were seated in the boat. Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.    In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing; he felt quite sure that he would never die.

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall (1930)Katherine Anne Porter

  She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry’s pudgy careful fingers and pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches. Doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose! “Get along now. Take your schoolbooks and go. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Doctor Harry spread a warm paw like a cushion on her forehead where the forked green vein danced and made her eyelids twitch. “Now, now, be a good girl, and we’ll have you up in no time.” “That’s no way to speak to a woman nearly eighty years old just because she’s down. I’d have you respect your elders, young man.” “Well, Missy, excuse me.” Doctor Harry patted her cheek. “But I’ve got to warn you, haven’t I? You’re a marvel, but you must be careful or you’re going to be good and sorry.” “Don’t tell me what I’m going to be. I’m on my feet now, morally speaking. It’s Cornelia. I had to go to bed to get rid of her.” Her bones felt loose, and floated around in her skin, and Doctor Harry floated like a balloon around the foot of the bed. He floated and pulled down his waistcoat, and swung his glasses on a cord. “Well, stay where you are, it certainly can’t hurt you.” “Get along and doctor your sick,” said Granny Weatherall. “Leave a well woman alone. I’ll call for you when I want you…Where were you forty years ago when I pulled through milk-leg and double pneumonia? You weren’t even born. Don’t let Cornelia lead you on,” she shouted, because Doctor Harry appeared to float up to the ceiling and out. “I pay my own bills, and I don’t throw my money away on nonsense!” She meant to wave good-by, but it was too much trouble. Her eyes closed of themselves, it was like a dark curtain drawn around the bed. The pillow rose and floated under her, pleasant as a hammock in a light wind. She listened to the leaves rustling outside the window. No, somebody was swishing newspapers: no, Cornelia and Doctor Harry were whispering together. She leaped broad awake, thinking they whispered in her ear. “She was never like this, never like this!” “Well, what can we expect?” “Yes, eighty years old…” Well, and what if she was? She still had ears. It was like Cornelia to whisper around doors. She always kept things secret in such a public way. She was always being tactful and kind. Cornelia

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was dutiful; that was the trouble with her. Dutiful and good: “So good and dutiful,” said Granny, “that I’d like to spank her.” She saw herself spanking Cornelia and making a fine job of it. “What’d you say, mother?” Granny felt her face tying up in hard knots. “Can’t a body think, I’d like to know?” “I thought you might like something.” “I do. I want a lot of things. First off, go away and don’t whisper.” She lay and drowsed, hoping in her sleep that the children would keep out and let her rest a minute. It had been a long day. Not that she was tired. It was always pleasant to snatch a minute now and then. There was always so much to be done, let me see: tomorrow. Tomorrow was far away and there was nothing to trouble about. Things were finished somehow when the time came; thank God there was always a little margin over for peace: then a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly. It was good to have everything clean and folded away, with the hair brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white, embroidered linen: the day started without fuss and the pantry shelves laid out with rows of jelly glasses and brown jugs and white stone-china jars with blue whirligigs and words painted on them: coffee, tea, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, allspice: and the bronze clock with the lion on top nicely dusted off. The dust that lion could collect in twenty-four hours! The box in the attic with all those letters tied up, well, she’d have to go through that tomorrow. All those letters – George’s letters and John’s letters and her letters to them both – lying around for the children to find afterwards made her uneasy. Yes, that would be tomorrow’s business. No use to let them know how silly she had been once. While she was rummaging around she found death in her mind and it felt clammy and unfamiliar. She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again. Let it take care of itself for now. When she was sixty she had felt very old, finished, and went around making farewell trips to see her children and grandchildren, with a secret in her mind: This was the very last of your mother, children! Then she made her will and came down with a long fever. That was all just a notion like a lot of other things, but it was lucky too, for she had once and for all got over the idea of dying for a long time. Now she couldn’t be worried. She hoped she had better sense now. Her father had lived to be one hundred and two years old and had drunk a noggin of strong hot toddy on his last birthday. He told the reporters it was his daily habit, and he owed his long life to that. He had made quite a scandal and was very pleased about it. She believed she’d just plague Cornelia a little. “Cornelia! Cornelia!” No footsteps, but a sudden hand on her cheek. “Bless you, where have you been?” “Here, Mother.” “Well, Cornelia, I want a noggin of hot toddy.” “Are you cold, darling?” “I’m chilly, Cornelia.” Lying in bed stops the circulation. I must have told you a thousand times.” Well, she could just hear Cornelia telling her husband that Mother was getting a little childish and they’d have to humor her. The thing that most annoyed her was that Cornelia thought she was deaf, dumb, and blind. Little hasty glances and tiny gestures tossed around here and over her head saying, “Don’t cross her, let her have her way, she’s eighty years old,” and she sitting there as if she lived in a thin glass cage. Sometimes granny almost made up her mind to pack up and

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move back to her own house where nobody could remind her every minute that she was old. Wait, wait, Cornelia, till your own children whisper behind your back! In her day she had kept a better house and had got more work done. She wasn’t too old yet for Lydia to be driving eighty miles for advice when one of the children jumped the track, and Jimmy still dropped in and talked things over: “Now, Mammy, you’ve a good business head, I want to know what you think of this?…” Old. Cornelia couldn’t change the furniture around without asking . Little things, little things! They had been so sweet when they were little. Granny wished the old days were back again with the children young and everything to be done over. It had been a hard pull, but not too much for her. When she thought of all the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had cut and sewed, and all the gardens she had made – well, the children showed it. There they were, made out of her, and they couldn’t get away from that. Sometimes she wanted to see John again and point to them and say, Well, I didn’t do so badly, did I? But that would have to wait. That was for tomorrow. She used to think of him as a man, but now all the children were older than their father, and he would be a child beside her if she saw him now. It seemed strange and there was something wrong in the idea. Why, he couldn’t possibly recognize her. She had fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wires with just a negro boy to help. That changed a woman. John would be looking for a young woman with a peaked Spanish comb in her hair and the painted fan. Digging post holes changed a woman. Riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies was another thing: sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes and sick children and hardly ever losing one. John, I hardly ever lost one of them! John would see that in a minute, that would be something he could understand, she wouldn’t have to explain anything! It made her feel like rolling up her sleeves and putting the whole place to rights again. No matter if Cornelia was determined to be everywhere at once, there were a great many things left undone on this place. She would start tomorrow and do them. It was good to be strong enough for everything, even if all you made melted and changed and slipped under your hands, so that by the time you finished you almost forgot what you were working for. What was it I set out to do? She asked herself intently, but she could not remember. A fog rose over the valley, she saw it marching across the creek swallowing the trees and moving up the hill like an army of ghosts. Soon it would be at the near edge of the orchard, and then it was time to go in and light the lamps. Come in, children, don’t stay out in the night air. Lighting the lamps had been beautiful. The children huddled up to her and breathed like little calves waiting at the bars in the twilight. Their eyes followed the match and watched the flame rise and settle in a blue curve, then they moved away from her. The lamp was lit, they didn’t have to be scared and hang on to mother any more. Never, never, never more. God, for all my life, I thank Thee. Without Thee, my God, I could never have done it. Hail, Mary, full of grace. I want you to pick all the fruit this year and see nothing is wasted. There’s always someone who can use it. Don’t let good things rot for want of using. You waste life when you waste good food. Don’t let things get lost. It’s bitter to lose things. Now, don’t let me get to thinking, not when I’m tired and taking a little nap before supper…. The pillow rose about her shoulders and pressed against her heart and the memory was being squeezed out of it: oh, push down the pillow, somebody: it would smother her if she tried to hold it. Such a fresh breeze blowing and such a green day with no threats in it. But he had not come, just the same. What does a woman do when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn’t come? She tried to remember. No, I swear he never harmed me but in that. He never harmed me but in that…and what if he did? There was the day, the day, but

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a whirl of dark smoke rose and covered it, crept up and over into the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows. That was hell, she knew hell when she saw it. For sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell, and now the two things were mingled in one and the thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head when she had just got rid of Doctor Harry and was trying to rest a minute. Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice in the top of her mind. Don’t let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you. Plenty of girls get jilted. You were kilted, weren’t you? Then stand up to it. Her eyelids wavered and let in streamers of blue-gray light like tissue paper over her eyes. She must get up and pull the shades down or she’d never sleep. She was in bed again and the shades were not down. How could that happen? Better turn over, hide from the light, sleeping in the light gave you nightmares. “Mother, how do you feel now?” and a stinging wetness on her forehead. But I don’t like having my face washed in cold water! Hapsy? George? Lydia? Jimmy? No, Cornelia and her features were swollen and full of little puddles. “They’re coming, darling, they’ll all be here soon.” Go wash your face, child, you look funny. Instead of obeying, Cornelia knelt down and put her head on the pillow. She seemed to be talking but there was no sound. “Well, are you tongue-tied? Whose birthday is it? Are you going to give a party?” Cornelia’s mouth moved urgently in strange shapes. “Don’t do that, you bother me, daughter.” “Oh no, Mother. Oh, no…”Nonsense. It was strange about children. They disputed your every word. “No what, Cornelia?” “Here’s Doctor Harry.” “I won’t see that boy again. He left just five minutes ago.” “That was this morning, Mother. It’s night now. Here’s the nurse.” “This is Doctor Harry, Mrs. Weatherall. I never saw you look so young and happy!” “Ah, I’ll never be young again – but I’d be happy if they’d let me lie in peace and get rested.” She thought she spoke up loudly, but no one answered. A warm weight on her forehead, a warm bracelet on her wrist, and a breeze went on whispering, trying to tell her something. A shuffle of leaves in the everlasting hand of God, He blew on them and they danced and rattled. “Mother, don’t mind, we’re going to give you a little hypodermic.” “Look here, daughter, how do ants get in this bed? I saw sugar ants yesterday.” Did you send for Hapsy too? It was Hapsy she really wanted. She had to go a long way back through a great many rooms to find Hapsy standing with a baby on her arm. She seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy’s arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting. Then Hapsy melted from within and turned flimsy as gray gauze and the baby was a gauzy shadow, and Hapsy came up close and said, “I thought you’d never come,” and looked at her very searchingly and said, “You haven’t changed a bit!” They leaned forward to kiss, when Cornelia began whispering from a long way off, “Oh, is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anything I can do for you?” Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I had hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all?

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What was it? Something not given back… Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges; it bored up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the Doctor now, no more talk, the time has come. When this one was born it should be the last. The last. It should have been born first, for it was the one she had truly wanted. Everything came in good time. Nothing left out, left over. She was strong, in three days she would be as well as ever. Better. A woman needed milk in her to have her full health. “Mother, do you hear me?” “I’ve been telling you – “ “Mother, Father Connolly’s here.” “I went to Holy Communion only last week. Tell him I’m not so sinful as all that.” “Father just wants to speak with you.” He could speak as much as he pleased. It was like him to drop in and inquire about her soul as if it were a teething baby, and then stay on for a cup of tea and a round of cards and gossip. He always had a funny story of some sort, usually about an Irishman who made his little mistakes and confessed them, and the point lay in some absurd thing he would blurt out in the confessional showing his struggles between native piety and original sin. Granny felt easy about her soul. Cornelia, where are your manners? Give Father Connolly a chair. She had her secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her. All as surely signed and sealed as the papers for the new forty acres. Forever…heirs and assigns forever. Since the day the wedding cake was not cut, but thrown out and wasted. The whole bottom of the world dropped out, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away. His hand had caught her under the breast, she had not fallen, there was the freshly polished floor with the green rug on it, just as before. He had cursed like a sailor’s parrot and said, “I’ll kill him for you.” Don’t lay a hand on him, for my sake leave something to God. “Now, Ellen, you must believe what I tell you….” So there was nothing, nothing to worry about anymore, except sometimes in the night one of the children screamed in a nightmare, and they both hustled out and hunting for the matches and calling, “There, wait a minute, here we are!” John, get the doctor now, Hapsy’s time has come. But there was Hapsy standing by the bed in a white cap. “Cornelia, tell Hapsy to take off her cap. I can’t see her plain.” Her eyes opened very wide and the room stood out like a picture she had seen somewhere. Dark colors with the shadows rising towards the ceiling in long angles. The tall black dresser gleamed with nothing on it but John’s picture, enlarged from a little one, with John’s eyes very black when they should have been blue. You never saw him, so how do you know how he looked? But the man insisted the copy was perfect, it was very rich and handsome. For a picture, yes, but it’s not my husband. The table by the bed had a linen cover and a candle and a crucifix. The light was blue from Cornelia’s silk lampshades. No sort of light at all, just frippery. You had to live forty years with kerosene lamps to appreciate honest electricity. She felt very strong and she saw Doctor Harry with a rosy nimbus around him. “You look like a saint, Doctor Harry, and I vow that’s as near as you’ll ever come to it.” “She’s saying something.” “I heard you Cornelia. What’s all this carrying on?” “Father Connolly’s saying – “ Cornelia’s voice staggered and jumped like a cart in a bad road. It rounded corners and turned back again and arrived nowhere. Granny stepped up in the cart very lightly and reached for the

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reins, but a man sat beside her and she knew him by his hands, driving the cart. She did not look in his face, for she knew without seeing, but looked instead down the road where the trees leaned over and bowed to each other and a thousand birds were singing a Mass. She felt like singing too, but she put her hand in the bosom of her dress and pulled out a rosary, and Father Connolly murmured Latin in a very solemn voice and tickled her feet. My God, will you stop that nonsense? I’m a married woman. What if he did run away and leave me to face the priest by myself? I found another a whole world better. I wouldn’t have exchanged my husband for anybody except St. Michael himself, and you may tell him that for me with a thank you in the bargain. Light flashed on her closed eyelids, and a deep roaring shook her. Cornelia, is that lightning? I hear thunder. There’s going to be a storm. Close all the windows. Call the children in… “Mother, here we are, all of us.” “Is that you Hapsy?” “Oh, no, I’m Lydia We drove as fast as we could.” Their faces drifted above her, drifted away. The rosary fell out of her hands and Lydia put it back. Jimmy tried to help, their hands fumbled together, and granny closed two fingers around Jimmy’s thumb. Beads wouldn’t do, it must be something alive. She was so amazed her thoughts ran round and round. So, my dear Lord, this is my death and I wasn’t even thinking about it. My children have come to see me die. But I can’t, it’s not time. Oh, I always hated surprises. I wanted to give Cornelia the amethyst set – Cornelia, you’re to have the amethyst set, but Hapsy’s to wear it when she wants, and, Doctor Harry, do shut up. Nobody sent for you. Oh, my dear Lord, do wait a minute. I meant to do something about the Forty Acres, Jimmy doesn’t need it and Lydia will later on, with that worthless husband of hers. I meant to finish the alter cloth and send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia for her dyspepsia. I want to send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia, Father Connolly, now don’t let me forget. Cornelia’s voice made short turns and tilted over and crashed. “Oh, mother, oh, mother, oh, mother….” “I’m not going, Cornelia. I’m taken by surprise. I can’t go.” You’ll see Hapsy again. What bothered her? “I thought you’d never come.” Granny made a long journey outward, looking for Hapsy. What if I don’t find her? What then? Her heart sank down and down, there was no bottom to death, she couldn’t come to the end of it. The blue light from Cornelia’s lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. Granny laid curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up. God, give a sign! For a second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this – I’ll never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light.

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