Gail Gauthier's Blog: Gail Gauthier Reads, page 9

Gene Stratton-Porter And Early Twentieth Century Population Shifts

In September I visited Gene Stratton-Porter's Cabin at Wildflower Woods in Rome City, Indiana. Prior to moving to Rome City, she lived in the Limberlost Swamp for eighteen years before it was drained. But because of some confusion over where Geneva, Indiana is, I wasn't able to coordinate hitting that site, too.

While at the Cabin at Wildflower Woods, though, I learned that Stratton-Porter was a multi-talented and remarkably successful woman. She was a published nature photographer and taught herself to develop her own pictures. She was a nature writer on top of her fiction writing. Her writing was so popular and sold so well that, while her well-to-do husband paid for their home in the Limberlost, Stratton-Porter paid for the one at Wildflower Woods. Oh, and she designed it herself with an open floor plan that would go over very well on HGTV.

She had problems with fans showing up at her home. Her books were being made into movies, but, according to our museum guide, she was dissatisfied with what Hollywood was doing with them. She became ill during the flu pandemic after WWI. While she survived it, it impaired her health. So because California is legendary for two things--the movies and the weather--she headed out there to start her own film company and maintain her health. If she hadn't been killed when a streetcar hit her car, she might have established herself in still another field.

Why Was Her Writing So Loved, Making Her So Successful?

Notice I said "loved." It wasn't necessarily well-regarded. Our guide at Wildflower Woods pointed out that critics didn't embrace Stratton-Porter's work. They found it "too sugary" and "overly sentimental and romantic."

Now I've only read one of her books. But by the writing standards of our day, A Girl of the Limberlost has a number of problems. The main character is "sugary" and perfect. She is successful at all she does. She doesn't do a lot in terms of resolving her own issues, either. As I said before, "saviors" keep stepping forward to do that. Other characters are far more interesting than she is. Today we would consider the book to have structural problems. A thread is introduced early on regarding a human threat to Elnora that is just dropped. So is a male character. And what's with the Billy the Orphan Boy thread? What does he have to do with Elnora? The book becomes a romance, but that element isn't introduced until well after the mid-point. Important characters are introduced very late. At the end of the book, there is a scene involving children playing Indian. Yes, nowadays most people would find it cringe-worthy. But, additionally, it has no purpose. It doesn't support any element of the book. Back then it was probably considered a cute, sentimental episode, but it's hard to see how it was necessary.

So why did readers love it so?

Poor Country Girl Takes On Society City Folk And Wins, Wins, Wins

I think what A Girl of the Limberlost is really about is the romanticizing of rural people. Elnora is introduced to us as a poor, ill-dressed girl attending the town school as a miserable outsider. With the help of the neighbor folks who provide her with the right clothes, she is well on her way to being loved by all. She beats everyone academically. She takes up the violin, and within three years is so good that she's performing in public. She is too good to try to steal the well-to-do city boy who shows up in the swamp away from his socialite girlfriend. But her incredible superiority attracts him, anyway. He advises her to "give up the college idea. Your mind does not need that sort of development. Stick close to your work in the woods. You are becoming so infinitely greater on it, than the best college girl I ever knew." He also tells her that "The world never so wanted your message as it does now. It is hungry for the things you know."

Another character announces that the town where he is living with his family is "secure while the children are so small, but when they grow larger, we are going farther north, into real forest, where they can learn self-reliance and develop backbone." Even the society girlfriend who has lost her fiance to Elnora says to her new man, "If you could have your choice you wouldn't have a society wife, either. In your heart you'd like the smaller home of comfort, the furtherance of your ambitions, the palatable meals regularly served, and little children around you...I'll be the other kind of a girl, as fast as I can learn. I can't correct all my faults in one day, but I'll change as rapidly as I can."

The "other kind of a girl" she's talking about, of course, is the kind Elnora is. Elnora's knowledge of rural ways, of the natural world, makes her superior.

This was a message that, I'm speculating, readers of Stratton-Porter's time wanted to hear.

And Why Did They Want To Hear It?

Remember, this book was published in 1909. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, America was undergoing a demographic shift. It was going from being an agrarian, rural country to an industrialized, urban one. In A Girl of the Limberlost, Stratton-Porter was romanticizing the recent past and creating a sentimental portrayal of the life people were leaving behind.

In the September/October issue of Poets & Writers, Jeremiah Chamberlin argues in Know Thyself: The Linguistics of Place that many of his students "just don't interact with or have a connection to the rural any longer." This is due to the population shift Stratton-Porter's readers were living through. Chamberlin's students, he believes, see rural characters in fiction as unbelievable if they are eloquent about their emotional life or have any knowledge or understanding of themselves.

I'm thinking that a hundred years ago, Gene Stratton-Porter's readers definitely had a connection with the rural. Not only did they find rural characters who were eloquent about their their emotional lives believable, they wanted to read about them.

The Limberlost Provides. But That's All That's Happening Environmentally Here.

A Girl of the Limberlost is the first book I can recall reading that involves characters who appreciate the natural world they're part of but exploit it without seeming to have any thought that they should or could do anything to preserve it.

Things Are Changing In That Old Swamp Of Mine

As I've said before, Elnora recognizes that the Limberlost is becoming depleted. "The swamp is almost ruined now," she says. "The maples, walnuts, and cherries are all gone." She just doesn't recognize that she and her family have a part in that. When her mother (in another adult savior move) moves the two of them to town to support Elnora in her new job(s), she says that if she needs more money to pay for their new lifestyle, "I'll sell some timber and put a few oil wells where they don't show much. I can have land enough cleared for a few fields and put a tenant on our farm." They are part of ruining the swamp, but they don't recognize it.

And how about the business of killing the creatures of the Limberlost? Okay. They are small creatures, moths and butterflies. I am not an anti-hunter, by any means, but I will admit that I am totally freaked out by the way characters in this book catch things they think are beautiful and kill them. Elnora gets a lot of credit for her knowledge of nature, especially her knowledge of the moths and butterflies of the Limberlost. Which, you know, she captures, kills, and sells. How good for the swamp is that?

When witnessing a moth leave its case and begin opening its wings, Elnora, her mother, and Elnora's young man agree that it took "the wisdom of the Almighty God to devise the wing of a moth. If there ever was a miracle, this whole process is one." They go on for quite some time on the spiritual aspects of the moths. But that doesn't save moths from the cyanide jar. Which, I guess, the Almighty God also devised.

There's lots of talk of cyanide jars.

"We must get the cyanide jar quickly," said Philip. "I wouldn't lose her for anything. Such a chase as she has led me!"

"This cyanide has lost its strength, and it's not working well. We need some fresh in the jar."

At one point, Philip happens to find the perfect butterfly for Elnora during a ball. He drops everything to get it packaged up to mail to her. He didn't have any cyanide, but gasoline was handy. Yikes.

A Time Before Environmentalism? Maybe, Maybe Not

I definitely recognize that I'm talking about a one-hundred-year-old book, a product of another time. Readers shouldn't project the values of their time onto another. If the naturalists of this earlier time had not yet become activists, that's just the way it is. Accept it, Gail.

But Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. President from 1901 to 1909, was creating national parks, bird reservations, and the national forest service in the years leading up to Limberlost's publication. And the Cincinnati Zoo was trying to save the passenger pigeon from extinction around the same time. It failed. The last passenger pigeon died there in 1914.

So activism had begun at the time Limberlost was written. That's no reason why an author writing then needed to include it in her book, of course. Especially if her book wasn't about nature at all, but something else altogether.

I will speculate about that another time.

They Only Seemed To Know Loving Nature

"...they are clearing the swamp so fast. Every year it grows more difficult to find things, and Indian stuff becomes scarcer."

For a while in my reading of A Girl of the Limberlost it was clear that Elnora was aware that the Limberlost was changing. But her concern was for what that means to her ability to generate income. Nothing I saw indicated that she or anyone else had any interest in preserving the swamp at all.

When Elnora approached the local school superintendent about getting a job, she was offered a position teaching natural history at each of the schools in the city. The value of what she knew about nature was respected. But there was no talk about preserving nature.

Elnora mounted the moths and butterflies she collected, creating collections she could sell. I can remember reading about people doing this in various books when I was young, but I can't recall anything recently. I'm assuming this is due to the fact that mounting them with pins on boards involves killing them, meaning they're being killed as trophies. This actually was addressed in a conversation between Elnora and young Billy, an orphan taken in by her neighbors. It turns out that Elnora's method for collecting her specimens meant they died of natural causes. She didn't actually have to kill them. "Between us, Billy, I think I like my old way best. If I can find a hidden moth, slip up and catch it unawares, or take it in full flight, it's my captive, and I can keep it until it dies naturally." Billy thought it didn't matter how she took her moths because they died in order to educate humans. "It's not like killing things to see if you can, or because you want to eat them, the way most men kill birds. I think it is right for you to take enough for collections, to show city people, and to illustrate the Bird Woman's books. You go on and take them! The moths don't care. They're glad to have you. They like it!"

Elnora was delighted with his argument. But did the moths also like the cyanide jar that was mentioned soon thereafter? Did they like being pinned, their legs drawn into position "in perfectly lifelike manner?"


At that point in the book, Elnora was revered for her knowledge of nature. In the eyes of the young man who joined her in her pursuit of moths, she was clearly superior to the young women he knew back in the in the city, including his fiance. But knowledge of and appreciation for nature seemed to be enough. Supporting nature just wasn't in the cards in this 1909 book.

But I kept reading.

An earlier version of this post appeared at Original Content.

Blogging the Limberlost: For Children or Adults

I assumed A Girl of the Limberlost was a children's book, one for much older children, but a children's book nonetheless. When I visited one of author Gene Stratton-Porter's historic sites (she has two in Indiana), I learned that the people there considered it be one of her novels.

That put a totally different spin on the switches to adult point-of-view I wrote about earlier. If Limberlost isn't a children's book, why shouldn't we be hearing from the adult characters?

Today it's not uncommon to find adult books with child main characters. The Flavia de Luce books are a well-known recent example. I recently The Inn at Lake Devine, which is an adult book with a child main character.* While I'm sure that teenage Elnora Comstock is considered the main character in A Girl of the Limberlost, the point of view switches mean other, adult characters get as much time on stage as she does. Last year's 2 AM at The Cat's Pajamas does something similar. In that book, there is a child who is one of three characters. Four, if you count the dog.

Limberlost was published in 1909, as I've mentioned before. My reading on the history of children's literature is spotty. But there may not have been as big a divide between what adults and children read in days of old. I've heard that everyone read Alice in Wonderland, for instance. I don't know what was going on with the "girl" classics of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, such as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Pollyanna, a book I've read was so popular that there were Pollyanna clubs. Who was it popular with? Children or children and adults?

My point being that everyone may have been reading A Girl of the Limberlost. I'm guessing they would have had to for Gene Stratton-Porter to have become as popular and successful as I learned that she was.

*Oops again. Natalie is a child in only the first quarter of the book.

Another version of this post appeared at Original Content.

Get Your Cybils Nominations In--Soon

You only have a few days left to nominate your favorite books for this year's Cybils Awards. This year I'm a Round 2 judge in the Middle Grade Fiction Category.

You'll be hearing more from me on this subject, oh, maybe in February.

Blogging the Limberlost: A Naturalist Is Not Necessarily An Environmentalist, And Everybody Loves Elnora

Thoughts early in my reading of A Girl of the Limberlost:

Naturalists Vs. Environmentalists

A naturalist has knowledge of the natural world. An environmentalist wants to protect the environment. See the difference? Naturalists have knowledge of the natural world but aren't necessarily interested in protecting it. Environmentalists don't have to have any great knowledge of the natural world to want to protect it.

That's what I was seeing at this point in Girl of the Limberlost. Elnora voiced a lot of knowledge of caterpillars and different types of moths. But she didn't indicate any realization that maintaining the Limberlost (which was drained in 1913, by the way) was important to her life there. Her concern to this point was all about getting what she needed from the Limberlost so she could sell it and continue her schooling.

I'm not pointing this out to be judgmental, by the way. I'm just saying that we're talking a very different thing here than I would expect to see in a book written and published now.

Is Lovable...Boring?

Already at this point in the story, Elnora's neighbors couldn't do enough for her. Her hard-hearted mother was possessive. Poor children were taken with her. A week after starting high school as a poor, rural, outsider, she had won everyone over. She meets a guy in the swamp who was a few years ahead of her in elementary school and immediately has him collecting nuts and berries with her. Everybody loved her, and as I find with most characters of that kind, I had no idea why.

Her problems were similar to the problems of many other YA characters, making her not particularly unique. The people I found more interesting were her neighbors, who she called Uncle Wesley and Aunt Margaret, and her mother. What made them interesting was that they're competing for children.

Wesley desperately wanted to love and nurture a child. His wife was fussier. She wanted to love and nurture a nice one. One like Elnora. Mrs. Comstock, Elnora's mother, had a child to love and nurture but didn't find it to be that big a deal. But her knickers were in a twist because Wesley and Margaret spent years providing Elnora with care and support. So when Wesley and Margaret tried to bring an orphaned boy into their home, she made clear to the young'un that if he ever had any problems with his new home, he could have one with her.

That's pretty damn diabolical. And a lot more interesting than being loved by all.

Blogging the Liberlost: Things Were Different Back Then

Been waiting for my thoughts on A Girl of the Limberlost, haven't you? Right off the bat, I noticed differences between this novel from 1909 and what I see in YA books today.

Environmental Issue


Today books for young readers that have any kind of environmental thread or theme usually involve conservation. The child characters become involved in saving some natural area from evil, or at least uncaring, developers. The characters in Carl Hiaasen's Scat are younger than Elnora Comstock, the protagonist in A Girl of the Limberlost, but they are dealing with a swamp and an oil company trying to steal oil found there. In A Girl of the Limberlost, characters live in the swamp and harvest its plants. Elnora raises money to go to high school by selling plants and moths and caterpillars she's collected. Her mother is berated by a neighbor for not selling trees from her land to get the money to provide for her daughter's education. The mother isn't holding out because she's an early environmentalist. She's obsessed with her long-dead husband, and the land she lives on was his.

At this point, I wondered if we were talking about humans managing an environment, the way farmers traditionally did. In early twentieth century America, people may not have had any thought that land and what grows on it should be protected. Protected from whom? From what?

Adult Point Of View

In those early chapters, we had some point-of-view switches, which are certainly common in contemporary YA and children's books. However, in A Girl of the Limberlost, we see a switch from a third-person teen point-of-view character to a third-person adult point-of-view character, that of Elnora's neighbors/protectors. We hear from this couple, one or the other of them, about the loss of their own children, explaining their embrace of Elnora. They provide backstory about Elnora's mother. In fact, the switch may occur so the author can get that information out.

The child/YA point-of-view is basic to contemporary children's and YA fiction. I can't think of any switches similar to the ones in Limberlost in any recent book I've read.

Adult Savior

Elnora was surrounded by adults in this early stage of the book who appear to be helping her solve her problems. The kindly neighbors provide school clothes. A teacher who has only just met her provides affordable used books and arranges for her to pay her tuition in installments. An artist miraculously appears to buy things from Elnora, making it possible for Elnora to pay her school costs. Elnora making her own money in this way may be meant to make her appear independent. But it's an adult who makes this action possible.

Adult saviors do appear in contemporary children's/YA fiction, often in the form of a mentor, a teacher, a coach. There are rather a lot of them here.

Trouble With Mom

Elnora's mother is hell on wheels in the early part of the book. I don't read a lot of the YA problem novels in which parental issues are a major factor. What little I know of them, parents fail in their duties because of various weaknesses on their part. Though we hear from those neighbors in one of their point of view switches (see above) that Mrs. Comstock is still grieving for her late husband (gone for well over a decade, I believe), the real explanation for her behavior toward her daughter seemed to me to be that she just couldn't tolerate her child being different from herself.

I think that is very realistic, myself. I don't know why I don't see more of it in contemporary YA.

And Then Some Things Don't Seem To Change

Elnora arrived at school and had your classic school outsider humiliations. She was told by one of her adult saviors that the same thing happened to her when she was at school.

Come on. This has been going on for over a hundred years, and we haven't figured out a way to do something about it? We put a man on the moon a while back, you know.

A variation of this post appeared at Original Content.

Literary Tourism With A Possible Environmental Connection

Earlier this month, I went on an extended vacation to Michigan and Indiana (by way of Canada and coming back through Ohio and Pennsylvania). This is the third road trip with bicycles that we've taken, and each time I worked in an author stop. When we did the Maritime Provinces, we visited Green Gables in Cavendish PEI, and I read Anne of Green Gables. Last year while in Ohio, we hit James Thurber's home in Columbus. I reread My Life and Hard Times.

This year we went to Gene Stratton-Porter's cabin at Wildflower Woods. I invested in a 99 cent eBook collection of her work, including A Girl of the Limberlost, the title that sounded most familiar to me. That's the one read.

While I looked forward to the home visit, I had a feeling of resistance about Limberlost. The book is over a hundred years old, and while I used to read children's books from that era and recall liking things like The Five Little Peppers and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, I was a lot younger then. My tolerance for...mmm...improving literature, which is what I was afraid Limberlost is, was a lot greater then. I may be beyond improvement now.

Then I realized that Limberlost might have an environmental angle, since Stratton-Porter is sometimes described as a nature writer. That could be interesting, especially given the book's age. It would also make it material for the Environmental Book Club feature at my Original Content blog.

Blogging the Limberlost

I also decided that reading the book might be more interesting, or at least less tedious, if I could respond to it while I was slogging through it. Hey, that's what blogs are for, right? And I've got one! Two counting this one at Goodreads.

So over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting my thoughts on a 116-year-old book about a girl and a swamp.

A slightly different version of this post appeared at Original Content

Marc Tyler Nobleman On Biography And Historical Nonfiction

I recently spent an hour listening to Marc Tyler Nobleman talk at my local library. He was speaking specifically about two of his books, Boys of Steel and Bill the Boy Wonder, biographies about mid-twentieth century comic book writers and illustrators. Boys of Steel is about the co-creators of Superman, and Bill the Boy Wonder is about the uncredited co-creator of Batman.

Nobleman's description of his books and how he went about writing them illustrate a couple of points made in a Horn Book article from a few years back on contemporary children's historical nonfiction.

1. Children's history books are no longer simplified versions of subjects that were already covered for adult readers. Instead, they often involve new research. Nobleman describes lengthy searches for the pictures of the childhood homes of some of his subjects and finding and interviewing people who had never even been contacted before. Some of these people are now dead, so no one is going to be interviewing them again.
2. Because children's writers often seek out new topics to write about, it's not unusual to find children's books that are the first on a subject or even the only book on a subject. That's the case with the titles discussed last night. Boys of Steel was the first stand alone book on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Bill the Boy Wonder is still the only book on Bill Finger.

Attending last night's talk so soon after reading Jane Sutcliffe's The White House Is Burning makes me wonder if children's historical nonfiction won't become another area in children's literature that attracts adult readers. Well-organized presentation and new research on little-known subjects--who wouldn't want to read that?

A slightly different version of this post appeared at Original Content.

My Atticus Finch Story

I am not a To Kill a Mockingbird groupy. I wasn't delighted when I heard there was a prequel/sequel coming out, and I'm not shocked and disappointed over what I've been hearing and reading about Atticus Finch's racism in Go Set a Watchman, that prequel/sequel. I actually find it interesting. Not interesting enough to read what sounds like a rough draft, but interesting.

This is not to say I didn't like To Kill a Mockingbird a great deal when I read it in my early teens. I read it the way a lot of young people read it back then--on my own. It hadn't become part of the American high school curriculum. It was probably among the first adult books I read, and I read it without anyone interpreting it for me in a classroom. Years later, I would speculate with a friend about how soon my kids could read it, because I couldn't wait. She said something like, "Ah...and the rape?" And I said something like, "Ah...rape?" I had no memory of that at all, just that I'd loved the book.

Now I reread Mockingbird as an adult. It was one of the rare situations of a book I'd liked when I was young holding up. At that point, though, I saw it as a father worship book. Atticus was a fantasy dad.

Years later, when I wrote The Hero of Ticonderoga, I would model Andrew Churchill, the out-of-state lawyer father of one of Therese LeClerc's classmates, on the Gregory Peck version of Atticus Finch. Andrew Churchill is educated, which Therese's own father is not. He wears a suit, which her father does not. His hands are clean, he doesn't work in a barn, he doesn't speak with an accent. He is Therese's fantasy dad.

He ends up being a disappointment, though, like the Atticus in Go Set a Watchman.

This post originally appeared at Original Content