The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles

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 colic from the sour.

      Appropriately Nettie is spared her father’s salvation by death because she is the only member of the family who has maintained hope for betterment in life. But Miles, with her usual penchant for inveigling a happy ending, is not content with letting Nettie and the baby live. She must bring in at the moment of Nettie’s greatest horror a rescuer in the form of the husband who had deserted her, pregnant and penniless, months before. Now just as Nettie discovers the deaths of all her family, Steve appears with sheltering arms, money, and a promise of a new start in a new town. Miles’s compassionate view of human nature and her fervent wish for a benevolent universal order explain why she invents a turn-around ending, but they do not justify it for the fiction.

      Nettie’s words summing up her commitment to life provide transition into another of Miles’s topics: “We seed a awful hard time . . . but look like where the’ was little ’uns—nobody would aim to die.”²⁵

      “Little ’uns” populate much of Miles’s writing—their begetting, birthing, nurturing. They are an important part of her affirmation of life. In only one story, though, does a child serve as the central character, and she is a catalyst who effects positive changes in the adults she encounters. Scarcely a plotted story at all, “Flyaway Flittermouse” (Harper’s, July 1910) is an enthusiastic, if somewhat sentimentalized, celebration of primal innocence and goodness as vested in a toddler.

      As a sidenote, this story, like several others by Miles, took its genesis from an actual happening. In July 1909, Emma’s two-year-old daughter Kitty wandered away from the other children on a quest for huckleberries. When her mother discovered her missing, an all-out search began. Eventually a young man who had been on his way to see his girl in the valley “appeared with the dirty, berry-stained, scratched & tangled little maid, very wide-eyed, in his arms. He had heard her crying, in a sand-flat towards Middle Creek.”²⁶ And so Kitty’s escapade provided the outline for “Flyaway Flittermouse.”

      Although the quality of Miles’s fiction varies, her crusade for women’s causes never tires. It marches through stories where the women are mere stereotypes, as in “The Home-Coming of Evelina” and “At the Top of Sourwood.” It entertains a skirmish in “The White Marauder” when the young wife shows more spirit than usual and even enjoys a momentary, though tainted, victory over the powerful men in her life. It pauses to reveal a relative equality between the elderly husband and wife in “Turkey Luck,” a parable that erases Miles’s usual life struggle and substitutes the local colorist heart-of-gold formula in the ending, in