Miss Grief and Other Stories (4 page)

Her darkest work, her fourth novel, even more fully exposes
the dangers of passionate love for women.
Jupiter Lights
(1889), set in the Carolinas and the Great Lakes, shows how love leads in one character's case to submission to an abusive husband and in another's to thoughts of suicide. While Margaret in
East Angels
resists the forceful persuasion of her would-be lover and thus preserves the inviolability of her deepest self, the heroine of
Jupiter Lights
, Eve, finds herself unable to turn her lover away, however degrading she feels her love for him is. His autocratic form of love renders Eve powerless. Should he even grow to hate her, she realizes, she would be happy simply to be near him and fold his shirts. In
Jupiter Lights
, more than in any other work, Woolson contributed to the development of literary naturalism in her exploration of the inherent weaknesses of her characters, from inherited alcoholism to the self-destructive nature of romantic love.

In her final novel,
Horace Chase
(1894), she strove to be thoroughly modern. Set in Asheville and St. Augustine, it portrayed a self-made businessman of the Gilded Age and his young wife, who has married him for money but later discovers real love for another man. As in so many of her works, Woolson portrayed a pair of women, one ultra-feminine and beloved, the other intellectual and unnoticed. Usually she subtly exposed the silent suffering of the less conventional woman, but here she made her vapid beauty discover the pain of unrequited love. In the end, when the wife confesses her adulterous feelings to her husband, he forgives her, proving himself to be a more noble and complex character than he at first appeared. Outside of the main couple, the novel also contains an array of contemporary types, such as the mannish female sculptor who smokes and determines that men's kisses
leave much to be desired and the invalid sister who cynically comments from her couch on the conventional lives of those around her.

After Woolson's death, Harper & Brothers published two volumes of her European stories,
The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories
(1895) and
Dorothy and Other Italian Stories
(1896). The most remarkable of the stories not already mentioned is “A Front Yard,” which portrays a sturdy New England spinster (a recurring type in Woolson's fiction) who takes on the care of her ungrateful stepchildren after the death of her Italian husband, all the while trying to create the New England garden of her dreams. “A Transplanted Boy,” one of the last stories Woolson wrote, heartbreakingly depicts a young expatriated American boy who has lost all connection with his homeland and nearly starves himself in an attempt to provide for his ailing mother. It expresses the loneliness and financial fears that haunted Woolson in her final months.

Woolson's works deserve wider attention today, not only for the way they broaden our understanding of late-nineteenth-century American literature, but also for the way they capture both the social texture of her time and the inner emotional lives of her characters. Her works contradict our assumptions about women's writing from that era, for Woolson did not seek recognition as a woman writer but as a writer. Thus she often tread on masculine territory in her work, while never trying to simply mimic the successes of her male peers. She sought instead to show them what was missing from their views of humanity, broadening the scope of literature to include the heartaches and triumphs of those most often overlooked, such as impoverished spinsters, neglected nuns, self-sacrificing wives
and widows, uneducated coal miners, and destitute Southerners. Most of all her writings reflect what is deeply human in all of us, particularly our need to be loved, to be understood, and to belong, none of which are easily accomplished in her stories, or in life.

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

The text of each story that follows is taken from its book publication, except for “In Sloane Street,” which was never published in a book. As the collections from which the stories come were published by four different publishers, their styles in terms of spacing and punctuation vary. These variations have been silently corrected, conforming to modern usage. For instance, what appeared as “is n't” in the original now appears as “isn't,” and spaces around em dashes, which varied widely in the original stories, have been closed. Spelling inconsistencies from one text to the next have been allowed to stand. In a few cases, where spelling inconsistencies existed within the same story, these have been silently corrected or noted. “In Sloane Street” presented special challenges because the original magazine publication is difficult to read and contained more errors than the stories published in books. Obvious errors, as with the few scattered in the other stories, have been silently corrected. Otherwise, the integrity of the original documents has been observed as closely as possible.

MISS GRIEF
and
OTHER STORIES

 

ST. CLAIR FLATS

….

I
N SEPTEMBER, 1855, I FIRST SAW THE ST. CLAIR FLATS.
Owing to Raymond's determination, we stopped there.

“Why go on?” he asked. “Why cross another long, rough lake, when here is all we want?”

“But no one ever stops here,” I said.

“So much the better; we shall have it all to ourselves.”

“But we must at least have a roof over our heads.”

“I presume we can find one.”

The captain of the steamer, however, knew of no roof save that covering a little lighthouse set on spiles, which the boat would pass within the half-hour; we decided to get off there, and throw ourselves upon the charity of the lighthouse-man. In the mean time, we sat on the bow with Captain Kidd, our four-legged companion, who had often accompanied us on hunting expeditions, but never before so far westward. It had been rough on Lake Erie,—very rough. We, who had sailed the ocean with composure, found ourselves most inhumanly tossed on the short, chopping waves of this fresh-water sea; we, who alone of all the cabin-list had eaten our four courses and dessert every day on the ocean-steamer, found ourselves
here reduced to the depressing diet of a herring and pilot-bread. Captain Kidd, too, had suffered dumbly; even now he could not find comfort, but tried every plank in the deck, one after the other, circling round and round after his tail, dog-fashion, before lying down, and no sooner down than up again for another melancholy wandering about the deck, another choice of planks, another circling, and another failure. We were sailing across a small lake whose smooth waters were like clear green oil; as we drew near the outlet, the low, green shores curved inward and came together, and the steamer entered a narrow, green river.

“Here we are,” said Raymond. “Now we can soon land.”

“But there isn't any land,” I answered.

“What is that, then?” asked my near-sighted companion, pointing toward what seemed a shore.

“Reeds.”

“And what do they run back to?”

“Nothing.”

“But there must be solid ground beyond?”

“Nothing but reeds, flags, lily-pads, grass, and water, as far as I can see.”

“A marsh?”

“Yes, a marsh.”

The word “marsh” does not bring up a beautiful picture to the mind, and yet the reality was as beautiful as anything I have ever seen,—an enchanted land, whose memory haunts me as an idea unwritten, a melody unsung, a picture unpainted, haunts the artist, and will not away. On each side and in front, as far as the eye could reach, stretched the low green land which was yet no land, intersected by hundreds of
channels, narrow and broad, whose waters were green as their shores. In and out, now running into each other for a moment, now setting off each for himself again, these many channels flowed along with a rippling current; zigzag as they were, they never seemed to loiter, but, as if knowing just where they were going and what they had to do, they found time to take their own pleasant roundabout way, visiting the secluded households of their friends the flags, who, poor souls, must always stay at home. These currents were as clear as crystal, and green as the water-grasses that fringed their miniature shores. The bristling reeds, like companies of free-lances, rode boldly out here and there into the deeps, trying to conquer more territory for the grasses, but the currents were hard to conquer; they dismounted the free-lances, and flowed over their submerged heads; they beat them down with assaulting ripples; they broke their backs so effectually that the bravest had no spirit left, but trailed along, limp and bedraggled. And, if by chance the lances succeeded in stretching their forces across from one little shore to another, then the unconquered currents forced their way between the closely serried ranks of the enemy, and flowed on as gayly as ever, leaving the grasses sitting hopeless on the bank; for they needed solid ground for their delicate feet, these graceful ladies in green.

You might call it a marsh; but there was no mud, no dark slimy water, no stagnant scum; there were no rank yellow lilies, no gormandizing frogs, no swinish mud-turtles. The clear waters of the channels ran over golden sands, and hurtled among the stiff reeds so swiftly that only in a bay, or where protected by a crescent point, could the fair white lilies float in the quiet their serene beauty requires. The flags,
who brandished their swords proudly, were martinets down to their very heels, keeping themselves as clean under the water as above, and harboring not a speck of mud on their bright green uniforms. For inhabitants, there were small fish roving about here and there in the clear tide, keeping an eye out for the herons, who, watery as to legs, but venerable and wise of aspect, stood on promontories musing, apparently, on the secrets of the ages.

The steamer's route was a constant curve; through the larger channels of the archipelago she wound, as if following the clew of a labyrinth. By turns she headed toward all the points of the compass, finding a channel where, to our uninitiated eyes, there was no channel, doubling upon her own track, going broadside foremost, floundering and backing, like a whale caught in a shallow. Here, landlocked, she would choose what seemed the narrowest channel of all, and dash recklessly through, with the reeds almost brushing her sides; there she crept gingerly along a broad expanse of water, her paddle-wheels scarcely revolving, in the excess of her caution. Saplings, with their heads of foliage on, and branches adorned with fluttering rags, served as finger-posts to show the way through the watery defiles, and there were many other hieroglyphics legible only to the pilot. “This time, surely, we shall run ashore,” we thought again and again, as the steamer glided, head-on, toward an islet; but at the last there was always a quick turn into some unseen strait opening like a secret passage in a castle-wall, and we found ourselves in a new lakelet, heading in the opposite direction. Once we met another steamer, and the two great hulls floated slowly past each other, with engines motionless, so near that the passengers
could have shaken hands with each other had they been so disposed. Not that they were so disposed, however; far from it. They gathered on their respective decks and gazed at each other gravely; not a smile was seen, not a word spoken, not the shadow of a salutation given. It was not pride, it was not suspicion; it was the universal listlessness of the travelling American bereft of his business, Othello with his occupation gone. What can such a man do on a steamer? Generally, nothing. Certainly he would never think of any such light-hearted nonsense as a smile or passing bow.

But the ships were,
par excellence
, the bewitched craft, the Flying Dutchmen of the Flats. A brig, with lofty, sky-scraping sails, bound south, came into view of our steamer, bound north, and passed, we hugging the shore to give her room; five minutes afterward the sky-scraping sails we had left behind veered around in front of us again; another five minutes, and there they were far distant on the right; another, and there they were again close by us on the left. For half an hour those sails circled around us, and yet all the time we were pushing steadily forward; this seemed witching work indeed. Again, the numerous schooners thought nothing of sailing overland; we saw them on all sides gliding before the wind, or beating up against it over the meadows as easily as over the water; sailing on grass was a mere trifle to these spirit-barks. All this we saw, as I said before, apparently. But in that adverb is hidden the magic of the St. Clair Flats.