The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
output. There were most likely other stories drafted, as indicated by her journal entries and letters. In his introduction to Once I Too Had Wings:The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918, Steven Cox lists titles of works that Miles says she has written and in some cases submitted for publication, but these have not come to light. However, I suspect that at least two of those in Cox’s list may have been published under titles other than the ones given in her journals and are in fact present in this collection.5 All of the major magazines of her era, such as Harper’s, Lippincott’s, Putnam’s, Century, Craftsman, and Red Book, have been thoroughly searched, as have the smaller, more obscure publications that she wrote for, including Mother’s Magazine, Youth’s Companion, Nautilus, and The Lookout. These seventeen stories are the result of those searches.
Some scholars have theorized that she may have allowed other writers to publish her work under their own names. Possibly that happened, for we know from her journals and letters that she collaborated extensively with Caroline Wood Morrison in 1908; she also wrote that she worked closely in 1908–10 with the sisters Alice McGowan and Grace McGowan Cooke, drawing illustrations and providing ideas for their books. All three of these collaborators, writers of some renown in Chattanooga, were publishing novels and stories set in Miles’s own home territory during the period from 1908 to 1910. A study of their work shows that they clearly benefited from Miles’s knowledge of the mountain people and her wordsmithing talents; what she gained from them is less clear. However, she may have allowed them to borrow her ideas, her drawings, and even her actual writing because they were better established than she and perhaps promised help in getting her work published.
Whatever the case, in the seventeen stories that we know were written by Emma Bell Miles (including one in collaboration with Caroline Wood Morrison), as well as in many of her poems and essays, her perceptions of men’s and women’s opposite realms of existence infuse the corpus of her work. Feminist that she is, her writings belong generally to the local color school, though literary historians usually claim that the local color movement was in decline by the time Miles began to publish.6 In the decade following her death, a new regionalism reached fruition, its proponents sharing a strong sense of place with the local colorists but imbuing their fiction even more overtly than most of their predecessors with social motives. According to critics Harry Warfel and Harrison Orians, “Authors wrote to support theses rather than to photograph a group of people against a setting.”7 Emma Bell Miles’s fiction and nonfiction stand between these two closely related impulses, her form and style taking their pattern largely from the nineteenth-century local colorists—that is, “photograph[ing] a group of people against a setting”; her purpose, however, with its intense seriousness, providing a bridge to the twentieth-century regionalists.
Miles’s stories can be profitably examined by these standards, for her whole body of fiction is a crusade for the liberation of women, coupled in her mind with the oppression of poverty. Yet Miles was well aware that poverty alone does not fetter women; in her Appalachian Mountain culture, as in most others throughout America, the traditions of the patriarchal society determined woman’s place.
Miles approached her subject matter at a time when the organized suffrage movement was still relatively new in the South, and virtually unknown in the mountain South. In her stories her vision of women and their utter dependence on marriage localizes itself to the Southern mountains, in reality her own Walden’s Ridge, Tennessee. Others were also writing about the Appalachian Mountains during this same period. “Somewhere on [her] blue horizon”8 reigned the queen of mountain fiction, Mary Murfree, whose view of the mountaineer fixed itself in the minds of Americans and to some extent remains there today. John Fox replicated Murfree’s picture to become one of the most popular authors in the country soon after the turn of the century. Dozens of other writers flocked to the Appalachians to view the scenery, to poke and prod the natives—if they dared—in their research for their next “piece.” Constance Fenimore Woolson put in her time on the Blue Ridge near Asheville; Joel Chandler Harris paid some visits to folks he knew up in North Georgia; Lucy Furman set up shop at Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky. But Emma Bell Miles did not have to go anywhere: she looked out her door; she listened to Frank, to Grandma Miles, to sister-in-law Laura Hatfield, to Aunt Lucy, to her babies. She wrote about the Appalachian mountaineer from home, and the view looked different from there. In 1914, after she had already composed most of her fiction that came to print, she remarked to an unidentified correspondent, “To one who has lived the life, the ordinary novel of moonshine & rifles seems merely newspaper twaddle.”9
It is hardly a wonder that Miles should ignore, if not reject, the “otherness” of Appalachia that critic Henry Shapiro claims was not initiated by, but solidly established in, Murfree’s fiction.10 The perception of otherness actuated an opposition between Appalachia and the rest of America, a strange incongruity, for the mountain region had once been the frontier of America. Its settlers, both those who stayed and those who passed through, were America’s settlers. But somewhere along the way, partially because of the region’s insularity, the ordinary changes of civilization were arrested. Appalachia retained into the twentieth century folkways attributed to ages and places as diverse as Chaucer’s England and eighteenth-century America. In the fervid search for local color by those who lived beyond the mountains, the differences, the otherness, spotted among the mountaineers became a rich vein to be mined. In fiction the contrast, and ultimately the opposition, between the familiar and the unfamiliar has been emblemized by the conflict between insider and outsider, represented most often by moonshiners and revenuers, feudists and lawmen, mountain girls and city boys.
But little of that touched Emma Bell Miles. She “lived the life”; she did not need to create dramatic tension through conflict between insider and outsider. She saw it daily between insider and insider, between woman’s dream and her reality. She verbalized her own concept of the normalcy of Appalachian culture when she wrote in 1907 to Anna Ricketson, a friend by correspondence in New Bedford, Massachusetts: “It is often hard for me to notice points of difference between our way of life and civilization, I am so used to the backwoods.”11 Her fiction does not build from without, then, as does that of other writers about Appalachia in her time. It grows from within, showing respect for the traditional folkways that have sustained the mountain people, but at the same time crying out against the cultural bonds that restrict, limit, and dehumanize the women. Her characters are mountaineers, but they are not peculiar or different from common people anywhere.
Three years elapsed between the publication of Miles’s fictionalized ethnography, The Spirit of the Mountains, and the first of what I am calling her “quasi-fictional” stories, a term not meant to diminish her work but rather to explain it as a type of discourse that draws from both literary and expository writing with a definite aim to convince and persuade. In a bit of prepublication criticism, she showed that she knew the qualities of her own writing, qualities that she seemed to consider detriments to her success. To Anna Ricketson she wrote in 1907 of her stories: “Mine generally lack the keen interest of action and plot which ‘The Circle’ [prize competition] makes a first consideration.” A few days later she continued, “I think my stories will never be popular; they are too serious. . . . Perhaps I shall acquire a lighter touch as the children grow older and the daily stress is somewhat relieved.”12
Two striking points emerge from this self-assessment. First, Miles is aware that her writing does something different from standard fiction; it lacks the “keen interest of action and plot.” At this stage in her life she could not recognize that the chronological mode of fiction with its past-tense narrative of “what happened” was not sufficient for her purposes, which tended toward a more generalized present-tense analysis of “what happens.”13 She wanted to write fiction, but her worldview demanded exposition. What emerged was a hybrid product that combined fabricated plots and characters based on her own experiences and observations, heavily laden with social commentary. Thus, she dubbed her stories “too serious.” Of course they were serious, because they carried her message to the world about the status of her gender; they were loaded with her moral conviction of wrong, which she could not express openly, even to herself, and so must camouflage in fiction. The second point to emerge from Miles’s statement is that in her own person she