{"id":141093,"date":"2019-11-25T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T16:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141093"},"modified":"2019-11-25T18:21:48","modified_gmt":"2019-11-25T23:21:48","slug":"feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/25\/feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Mary Heaton Vorse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a> explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman<\/a>, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mary Heaton Vorse.<\/p><\/div>\n

Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel I<\/em>\u2019ve Come To Stay<\/em> calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life\u2019s \u201cblue serge lining\u201d\u2014a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world. The lining stands for the inevitable conformity of class, getting, if not quite under the wearer\u2019s skin, then next to it, holding her upright, constraining her imagination and her freedom. Camilla is constantly on the run from it. She embraces the pretensions of bohemian Greenwich Village\u2014anarchist friends, artistic aspirations, a Polish violinist lover, and nights spent in smoky bars. She repeatedly rejects her neighbor and suitor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, out of fear that he will wrap her up in blue serge once again, and strangle her with it. Subtitled A Love Comedy of Bohemia<\/em>, the novel is more of an archaeological find than a timeless classic. Yet its ironic depiction of young people caught between ambition and gender-based expectation dramatizes the central conflict of its author\u2019s life, and that of her generation of American \u201cNew Women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mary Heaton was born rich and rebellious in 1874, and spent most of her childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts, a place that was, by contrast, rural and religious. She was close to her bookish father and idolized her distant mother, Ellen, who paid more attention to her five older children from her first marriage. Mary watched her intelligent, energetic mother struggle to fill her days with meaningful activity. Other women of her era and class threw themselves into social reform and the fight for women\u2019s suffrage, but Ellen believed too many people already had the vote, and that a woman\u2019s place was in the home. This did not preclude plenty of European travel and culture to burnish her daughters\u2019 marriage prospects, and Mary had a rich, if haphazard education, bolstered by voracious private reading. Although she belonged to a generation of women who were breaking down the doors to academia and the professions, she had no interest in submitting to the rules of a women\u2019s college. She longed for a greater freedom, and begged to go to Paris to study art.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Her mother insisted on coming with her, somewhat curtailing the nineteen-year-old\u2019s freedom to indulge in the temptations of the Left Bank, but Mary managed her first serious romance there with a domineering fellow art student. Although she didn\u2019t consider herself especially beautiful\u2014photographs show a thin woman with a strong straight nose, wide mouth, and pouched, intelligent eyes\u2014Mary nevertheless exuded confidence, and rarely had trouble attracting men. Her lover praised her intelligence and independence, yet undermined it by constantly pointing out her social and physical limitations as a woman. It was a dynamic that would mark Mary\u2019s subsequent relationships, and come to life over and over again in her fiction: the young heroine enthralled by male strength, but chafing against male dominance.<\/p>\n

Back in America, Mary convinced her parents to let her go to New York to continue her art studies, adopting the persona of the \u201cBachelor Girl.\u201d This mid-1890\u2019s phenomenon, a more rebellious version of the already mythologized \u201cNew Woman,\u201d was discussed with an eager censoriousness, while the girls themselves enjoyed a brief respite from family obligations. \u201cI am part of the avant-garde. I have overstepped the bounds!\u201d Mary wrote exultantly. Having realized rather late that she could not paint, she attached herself to the male-dominated literary scene that was drinking and pontificating in downtown cafes in the late 1890\u2019s. In 1898, she met and secretly married Albert White Vorse, the Harvard-educated son of a Massachusetts minister trying as earnestly as she was to reinvent himself as a bohemian. Mary\u2019s biographer quotes Bert\u2019s delight at discovering that, despite her Paris sojourn, he had been the one to take her virginity (after noting how she \u201chesitated\u201d and he \u201cpushed\u201d her). Their letters make clear Mary\u2019s deeply conflicted desires for marriage and independence.<\/p>\n

Although she published her first short story in a local newspaper at the age of sixteen, and was now regularly publishing book reviews, Mary (and Bert) insisted that her writing was merely something to fill her time. But before long it became obvious that she was the talent and the breadwinner in the house. Perhaps they might have navigated this uneven division of labor, but then there was a baby, and then there was Bert\u2019s cheating. In the first of many attempts at a fresh start, the couple decamped for France in 1903, where Mary started writing fiction. \u201cI reel off stuff like a regular phonograph,\u201d she wrote\u2014painfully aware that Bert, at the same time, was a stuck record. In her midthirties, Mary\u2019s literary star rose as her marriage crumbled. In 1924, she wrote an essay, \u201cWhy I Have Failed As A Mother,\u201d that articulated the impossible struggle between motherhood and work. She admits that the fault lies not just in the obligation to earn money, though she certainly felt that. No, her real failure, as she saw it, was the very thing that was supposed to undergird male success: \u201cI grew ambitious.\u201d She writes that she dreaded leaving her desk to face her children and their needs: \u201cThey seem to me like a nestful of birds, their yellow beaks forever agape for me to fill.\u201d Yet her intense love for them, detailed in story after story, was as much of a drive as the work.<\/p>\n

Between 1906 and 1911 Vorse sold story after story about domestic relationships and family life\u2014popular fiction that was lucrative enough to support her family. Her fiction was aimed at a middle-class female audience, but it resonated with men trying to figure out their roles in a changing society. The marital ideal was shifting away from the traditional dynamic of dominance and submission, toward a union of friendly equals. Yet gender roles, deeply ingrained, could not be shaken loose as easily as that. Her novels from this period\u2014The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman\u2019s Wife<\/em>, Autobiography of an Elderly Woman<\/em>, The Heart\u2019s Country<\/em>\u2014often blame men for failing to understand women, but she also criticizes women for embracing their own subservience, whether to husbands or children. Mothers who sacrifice their own needs for their families\u2014as dramatized in her 1907 story \u201cThe Quiet Woman\u201d\u2014end up breeding \u201cbeautiful soulless monstrosities,\u201d as selfish and tyrannical as their mothers were selfless. Yet Vorse also paid a rare degree of attention to parental love. Her 1911 novel The Very Little Person<\/em> brings to life a father\u2019s bewildered affection for his infant daughter, emphasizing how absurdly little middle-class men were expected to know about children and about women\u2019s maternal experiences. A subtle rivalry and distance lingers between the parents, John and Constance. When his wife reports on their daughter\u2019s first smile, John feels \u201csecretly hurt that the baby hadn\u2019t smiled at him, and to hide this feeling, pretended a disbelief.\u201d The book\u2019s ending hovers in that gap between them, with John triumphant that his daughter has said her first word, and thus \u201cshe isn\u2019t a baby any more, she is a grown-up little girl.\u201d He is utterly oblivious to the heartbreak this causes his wife.<\/p>\n

The Very Little Person <\/em>is rooted in close and tender observation of Mary\u2019s own daughter, conceived partly in an effort to save her marriage. Mary had tried to reconcile herself to Bert\u2019s cheating by treating him with the patience of a mother nursing a sick child. (She would scrutinize that \u201cmaternal instinct\u201d of women toward adult men in I\u2019ve Come To Stay<\/em>, six years later.) The marriage was all but over by the time Bert died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, alone in a hotel on Staten Island in 1910. The next day, Mary\u2019s mother died of heart failure.<\/p>\n

It is hardly surprising that the direction of Mary\u2019s life and writing changed after this brutal break with the past. Yet it was the 1912 textile workers\u2019 strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that she would name in her 1934 autobiography as the turning point. For the rest of her life, until her death in 1966 at the age of ninety-two, workers\u2019 battles for fair treatment would be her primary focus. \u201cWe knew now where we belonged;\u201d she wrote, \u201con the side of the workers, and not with the comfortable people among whom we were born.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conditions in the mills at Lawrence are still shocking. At the turn of the century, workers, many of them teenagers, scraped by on two or three dollars a week, most of which went to paying their rent in overcrowded districts. Women were subject to routine sexual exploitation by their bosses, and death from accidents or lung diseases were everyday occurrences. Thirty-six out of every hundred men and women who worked the mills died before the age of twenty-five. In early 1912, the state attempted to enforce a law cutting the hours of the women and those under eighteen in the mills to fifty-four hours a week. In response, the mill owners cut everyone\u2019s hours and their salaries, and were accused of speeding up output.<\/p>\n

Vorse\u2019s report on the \u201cThe Trouble at Lawrence,\u201d ran in Harper\u2019s<\/em>, where she was one of the few left-leaning writers the magazine would publish. (She also wrote for liberal publications like The Nation<\/em> and The New Republic<\/em>, and was a contributor and editor at the Greenwich Village socialist monthly The Masses<\/em>.) Her piece opened with a focus on a group of workers\u2019 children, who had been prevented by local authorities from leaving Lawrence to stay with relatives in other cities\u2014a relief effort spearheaded by Margaret Sanger. The \u201cforcible detention\u201d of children was the rare event, Vorse wrote, that Americans all over the country would surely rise up to protest. She went on to describe the killing of a nineteen-year-old Syrian striker by a member of the militia formed by the Lawrence factory owners to put down the strike, and the reaction of his community, noting both the exotic beauty of the women in the Syrian quarter and the presence of posters that had lured immigrants from Damascus with the promise of good jobs. Although the strikers were \u201cof warring nations and warring creeds\u201d (Lawrence\u2019s workforce included at least twenty-five nationalities), Vorse wrote that they had come together spontaneously in protest. The experience opened their eyes to a life, and a world, beyond home and the mill, she said hopefully. \u201cA strike like this makes people think.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mary traveled to Lawrence with Joe O\u2019Brien, a reporter she\u2019d met the year before, and they married three months later. He was a gregarious, joyful partner who loved family life, and they soon had a son together to join Mary\u2019s two older children. She continued to write \u201clollypops\u201d\u2014her lucrative women\u2019s stories\u2014and to spend summers at her home in Provincetown, an anchor for her throughout her life, and began to turn it into the summer \u201ccolony\u201d of their Greenwich Village friends. In 1915, those friends staged the first performances of the avant-garde theater group they called the Provincetown Players, performing each other\u2019s daring, satirical, self-consciously modern plays. Sinclair Lewis passed through, and later credited Mary with teaching him \u201cthe three Rs\u2014Realism, Roughness, and Right-Thinking.\u201d But through this social and energetic time, O\u2019Brien was plagued with an illness that turned out to be stomach cancer. Mary was widowed again after just five years of marriage. During her subsequent relationship with the political cartoonist Robert Minor, she suffered a devastating second-trimester miscarriage, and spent several years afterward addicted to the morphine she was given for the pain.<\/p>\n

Yet she continued to write and travel to protests and war zones, always with a focus on the human story. Through her friendships with labor activists and her reporting, she was especially aware of the intersecting challenges of being female and working class. She was also the rare journalist who actively participated in strikes and worked with unions, enabling her to bring an insider perspective to readers. During World War II, she was perhaps the oldest American foreign correspondent\u2014seventy-one when the war ended\u2014and politically active up until her death.<\/p>\n

In addition to her novels and journalism, Vorse published two volumes of humorous, sharp-eyed memoir, A Footnote to Folly <\/em>in 1935, and Time and the Town<\/em>, in 1942, a \u201cchronicle\u201d of her beloved home in Provincetown, where she lived on and off for thirty-six years. Her fiction hints at the compromises and costs of rebellion for middle-class women of her era, but her autobiographical writing lays bare what it really meant to break out and blaze her own trail. Vorse wrote for the world in which she lived, with an immediacy that cares little for posterity. To read her now feels as disorienting as time travel, plunging us into a world that resembles ours but for which we\u2019re lacking crucial maps and signposts. Nevertheless, some values hold strong. Throughout her long flight from that stifling Amherst mansion, Mary Heaton Vorse cherished freedom and the people who would fight for it, a value that to her was not an abstraction but a deeply human impulse.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joanna<\/span>\u00a0Scutts<\/span>\u00a0is a cultural historian and critic, and the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1307,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34367],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminize-your-canon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeminize Your Canon: Mary Heaton Vorse by Joanna Scutts<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 25, 2019 \u2013 The prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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to escape her upper-middle-class origins.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/25\/feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/25\/feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/25\/feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/mary-heaton-vorse-1-1024x569-1.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/mary-heaton-vorse-1-1024x569-1.jpg","width":1024,"height":569,"caption":"(Original Caption) One of the principal figures around which the Passaic, New Jersey, textile strike is surging is Mary H. Vorse, socialist, short story writer, globe trotter and correspondent. Mrs. Vorse, press agent for the strikers, makes her home in the art colony at Providence, Massachusetts, and for the last decade has been prominently identified with many phases of the labor movement in this country."},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/25\/feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Feminize Your Canon: Mary Heaton Vorse"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. 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