The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 fiction may also fulfill. But much fiction employs a chronological scheme to accommodate the narrative; and elements of plot, setting, character, and conflict convey the writer’s meaning. In exposition, analogical and tautological schemes carry the argument on a theoretical or general level, though specific illustrations and narrative anecdotes often exemplify points. When story and exposition converge, as in Miles’s quasi fiction, the structure has a narrative organization with an expository intent. “The Broken Urn” looks like, and is, a story, but Miles is first and last a teacher. As such, she must reiterate her point and moralize: “for we are all as incapable of holding constantly to great thoughts as of putting such definitely into words.” The narrative itself is her exemplum; the authorial commentary her sermon.²⁰

      As Miles parades her fictional women before us, we note the slight variations in their common lot. Two young women are matched with preachers, and in both cases, the outcome of the match is problematic. Averilla Sargent, the village flirt in “A Dark Rose” (Harper’s, February 1909), at first refuses Luther Estill’s proposal, but after a bit, she accepts him and vows to go with him as he preaches, to lead the singing, to show that she can be “good” for him. But the conversion comes too easily for Averilla and makes one suspect her sincerity. This manipulated ending raises other questions: Does Miles deliberately choose not to convince us of Averilla’s conversion? Does she see Averilla as a type for those women who have employed a ruse and lived it because they think they must in a male-centered world?

      “Mallard Plumage” (Red Book, August 1909) gives us a young wife who has the audacity to rebel against her May–December marriage to old Preacher Guthrie, who has locked her into a staid, restrictive existence. She flees with her young love from her premarriage days, only to bear the child of the husband she runs away from. In a predictable turn at the end, old Guthrie is taken in by the young people and nursed until his death, which comes as a result of a fall suffered while pursuing the runaways. True to the local color formula, Roma and Atlas display “hearts of gold” in their final actions toward Guthrie, and he does the same when, on his deathbed, he gives them his blessing to marry.

      “The Dulcimore” (Harper’s, November 1909) hands us a twist in the form of a mother-daughter conflict over an impending marriage, one that sounds much like Emma Bell’s experience with her own mother. Selina Carden has groomed her daughter, Georgia, for a life outside the mountains. She wants Georgia to study music, to find a mate different from those offered by the circumscribed mountain culture. But Selina’s ambitions for Georgia are to be thwarted by the same implacable fate that had thwarted her own twenty years earlier. The girl has, “while awaiting the Prince, unwittingly become bound to Return,” the mountain blacksmith who secretly whittles her a dulcimore because he knows she likes music.²¹ None of Selina’s pleas can change Georgia’s mind.

      The mother felt as though striving in a nightmare with bending, splintering weapons. . . . Had she not fought this same losing fight once before? She had never forgotten the days and weeks before her own marriage; the struggling, resisting, calling to her aid all habit and tradition, all maidenly reserve and family pride—in vain. She had suffered in withstanding; she had suffered in yielding; and her suffering had not mattered in the least, would not matter now.²²

      In desperation she spills her own story, her own struggle, her own sacrifice. “One baby after another. Yet the babies were all that kept me alive. . . . It would be easy enough to die for a man; it’s hard to live for him—to give him all your life just when you want it most yourself.” The mother’s story wrenches the girl’s emotions, but it effects an opposite reaction from the intended one. Georgia recognizes why her mother has stayed in this hard life when she whispers, “Mother! Don’t you see, now—. . . Now you have showed me—what love is, what it means to us women.”²³

      Miles’s crusade becomes the more plaintive when one realizes that Selina Carden perhaps takes her words from Emma’s own mother, Martha Bell, when she warns her talented daughter, “You’re blinded. . . . You can’t see now; but when you wake up and find yourself dragged down to the level of his people, it will break your heart.”²⁴ Emma may well have been recalling the parental struggle she faced in her determination to marry Frank Miles some eight years earlier, coupled with the truth she knows now about married life. Creativity frustrated, ambition suppressed, body and spirit worn thin—these are the costs of womanhood. In 1909 the author can only arraign “the great laws of the universe” for this biological and spiritual demand that pits woman against herself, giving her fulfillment on the one hand and privation on the other.

      Miles shifts her focus somewhat in “Three Roads and a River” (Harper’s, November 1910), possibly her best-crafted story and certainly one of the most powerful. The marriage theme is still present, but it takes a backseat to dire poverty. Shell Hutson becomes a criminal out of bitter need. In debasing himself to commit theft, assault, and robbery to supply food for his starving family, he forfeits two of the mountaineer’s strongest characteristics: his pride and his independence. Sociologists have noted the mountain man’s reluctance to ask for help; he would prefer to suffer, starve, and even die rather than take charity. But Shell is responsible for children, women, and an aging parent. In Dreiser-like fashion Miles drags Shell and the whole family lower and lower—from the once proud and prosperous keepers of the toll road and ferry to shamed, destitute starvelings. Caught in a deterministic trap, old Zion, Shell’s father, the patriarch, believes himself morally responsible for the family. Reaffirming the mountaineer’s choice of death over such a life, he asks for—and thinks he receives—a sign from God, making him the implement to carry his family from misery to peace “jist over, jist over Jordan.” The poison added to the poke-stalk pickles is taken by old Zion almost like a sacrament and passed with the same reverence to his unwitting family. Only his daughter Nettie refuses to eat, fearing her nursing baby will take СКАЧАТЬ