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 offered a perfect example of the cause she crusaded for. “Perhaps I shall acquire a lighter touch as the children grow older and the daily stress is somewhat relieved.”
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
