The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
Miles placed her first story, “The Common Lot,” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in December 1908, where it appeared with three full-page illustrations drawn by Lucius Wolcott Hitchcock. It was the first of five stories by Miles that Harper’s would publish between December 1908 and November 1910. During this same period, notable authors such as William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and Willa Cather were writing for Harper’s—thus putting Miles among heady company.
“The Common Lot” serves in many ways as her signature piece by probing the dilemma of the mountain woman’s lot in life: marriage versus spinsterhood. Sixteen-year-old Easter Vanderwelt examines the life of her married sister as she helps with the unceasing toil to meet the needs of the babies, the husband, the women themselves, the little house they live in. From tending the garden patch to milking the cows to nursing the ailing baby, sister Cordy confronts a new pregnancy and begins to mend the clothes that her last baby has barely outgrown. Death precedes birth, however, and Easter hears Cordy’s fatalistic declaration over her baby’s grave, “I’ve got no idy the next’ll thrive any better.”14 In a foreshadowing of her own plight years later, Miles has Cordy deliver the only prayer offered for her baby before its burial. Frequent pregnancies, the rigors of childbirth, and the specter of infant death define Cordy Hallet’s view of married life—and that of most mountain women.
With such a vision before her, Easter understandably fears marriage. Practicing the restraint that her times required, Miles can only imply that Easter’s fear is rooted in part in the sexual and biological demands of wifehood. Easter occupies the curious position, as many a rural child does, of having witnessed and assisted at births and deaths; she knows much of the elemental aspects of life. Yet the sex act and the workings of her own body represent mysteries that she is not sure she wants to fathom. Although she never verbalizes the cause of her worries, she shares her concern with Cordy. The sister replies, “You don’t need to be afeared. . . . You’d be better off with him [Allison, Easter’s suitor] than ye would at home, wouldn’t ye? Life’s mighty hard for women anywhars.” From this discussion and her own long consideration Easter comes to see that her choice is “slavery in her father’s house or slavery in a husband’s.” Harsh as such an assessment may seem, it depicts a woman’s view, unhampered by illusion, of what her culture has to offer. She ultimately chooses a husband and her own home, realizing that to refuse them means refusing “the invitation of life” and “the only development possible to her.”15 In so doing she has acknowledged the common lot of mountain women, and perhaps of rural women everywhere.
Miles softens her picture of woman’s toil and constriction with the promise of romantic love and spiritual fulfillment of sorts. Yet she persists in pushing the hardships to the forefront. Like other local colorists, she straddled a splintery fence between realism and romanticism. On the one side grew the rose and on the other the brier; their commitment to fidelity obliged local colorists to include both. Readers of the popular magazines, and consequently editors, seemed to prefer roses in their endings. Disturbing resolutions or indeterminate endings are rare exceptions in local color writing. Melodrama, defined as “an affirmation of a benevolent moral order in the universe,”16 is much more common.
In her presentation of the mountain woman’s experience, then, Miles runs the risk of uncovering the ugly, the lewd, the tragic. To ameliorate those revelations, she steps into most of her stories and works the details into a seemingly happy resolution. The reasons for her manipulation are more complicated than the mere satisfaction of reader expectation. We must remember that she was a crusader with an ideal worldview; in her personal life she summoned an eternally rebounding hope to help her cope with problems far greater than any she ever depicted in fiction. The stories become her wish-fulfillment of situations working out satisfactorily within the mountain culture. In her fictional sorties she spotlights the privation, subservience, and limitations of mountain women; but in her retreats she withdraws to the safety of compensations. The divisiveness in herself and her fiction probably swells from two factors. First, the mountain culture truly does offer rewards to women through the giving and nurturing of life, as Miles allows Easter Vanderwelt and her sister protagonists to see. And second, as spokesperson for her culture, Miles must bear in mind her personal relationship to the people about whom she writes; they are a proud and fiercely independent lot who look with suspicion at her work because it is alien to their largely oral culture. Her mother-in-law, Cynthia Jane Winchester Miles, allegedly remarked, “These here writers and type-writers will do to watch.” Is there any wonder that her daughter-in-law alternates her attacks with rewards?
As indicated earlier, “The Common Lot” in both title and subject matter can stand as Miles’s battle cry in her crusade. Almost all of the other stories are variations on its theme. In fact, the first seven published stories feature a girl or young woman as protagonist—one who faces the prospect of marriage or deals with the consequences of it. “The Broken Urn,” published in Putnam’s Magazine in February 1909, opens with two small girls already wearing the yoke of their gender, as shown in the play they engage in. They cook and clean in their rock playhouse; they piece quilt patterns from scraps of cloth cast off by grannies and cousins; and they talk of being married someday. But their paths are to diverge and their burdens to differ as they grow into womanhood. One stays on the mountain and marries her childhood sweetheart; the other weds the hotel proprietor’s son and leaves the highlands behind. Sarepta Kinsale’s battle with poverty, toil, and infant death is set against her childhood playmate’s wealth, idleness, and thriving baby. Yet Nigarie Stetson, the playmate who migrated from the mountain and formed a new life in a totally different culture, is the restless one, the malcontent. Sarepta is the character who grows into an “understanding of the quiet, unassailable dignity of her own position, and [learns] the intrinsic worth of usefulness as contrasted with the false value of unearned riches.”17
The story’s title comes from a quilt pattern that Nigarie and Sarepta as little girls had altered to make a whole vessel they called “the Friendship’s Urn.” Miles’s choice of “The Broken Urn” rather than “The Friendship’s Urn” as title suggests Nigarie’s incapacity to have a life filled to the brim as Sarepta can. Nigarie is the incomplete vessel that has no room for the pain and suffering Sarepta experiences, and also no room for the sublime happiness that is Sarepta’s as she fills her whole urn of life day after day with a mixture of the bitter and the sweet. Nigarie’s broken urn contains only fleeting moments of gaiety, only brief occasions of real usefulness, but she does offer the gift of life to Sarepta’s baby when she lifts him impulsively to her breast. “Why, he’s starved most to death. . . . I reckon you ain’t been able to nurse him. I wish I could—why couldn’t I?” It is her richest moment, this season in her friend’s humble home, where she coaxes a tiny life to blossom through the nourishment of her own body and receives in return nourishment for her soul. But it is not to last. Nigarie is the displaced mountaineer, one who longs to come home, but who cannot stay there when she arrives. In a moment of candor she confesses to Sarepta and her husband: “‘We’ve been everywhere, Sam and me. . . . I’ve lived at the sea-shore, in the West, and we had a winter in New York; but I always wanted, I think, to come back here—on a visit,’ she added the concluding words hastily, for she knew that no place on earth could hold her long.”18
As the restless Nigarie flits back to her adopted culture, and Sarepta realizes the value of her own simple life in comparison, Miles meticulously controls her story’s close. She describes the mountain girl’s new awareness in language that Sarepta would never use and in concepts that Sarepta would never formulate. Miles leads the reader carefully by the hand as she editorializes: “Later, she [Sarepta] might lose sight of the vision somewhat, for we are all as incapable of holding constantly to great thoughts as of putting such definitely into words; but when the trailing glories paled, here was a child, gloriously alive, to remind her that she had once been inspired with the profoundly rational courage of seeing things as they are.”19
The author’s over-control in the ending may grate on the sensibility of the reader who wants a more subtle resolution for her fiction. However, if she can accept Miles’s aim as an expository one, she will understand how the author is operating. Exposition is designed to inform, to instruct, to persuade—all purposes that