Gene Stratton-Porter

From Philosopedia

Gene Stratton-Porter (17 August 1863 - 7 December 1924)

Geneva Grace Stratton was born on Hopewell farm in Wabash County, Indiana, the (unplanned and) youngest of twelve children. Her father, Mark Stratton, was a prosperous farmer and a licensed Methodist minister. Her mother, Mary (Shallenberger) Stratton, died in 1875 upon becoming ill when her youngest child was five.

A farm girl, Stratton had little formal schooling but was interested in nature and wildlife. When the family moved to Wabash, she attended school and completed all but the last term of high school.

On 21 April 1886, she married a druggist and banker, Charles D. Porter, who was thirteen years her senior, and they had one daughter, Jeannette, who was born in 1887.

According to the Indiana Historical Society,

• After oil was discovered on some farmland Mr. Porter owned, Gene Stratton-Porter used the new family wealth to construct a 14-room home, which she designed herself, near the Limberlost Swamp.

• The Limberlost Swamp was where Stratton-Porter soon began to photograph birds and animals in their natural habitat. She sent these photographs, with no explanation, to Recreation magazine. Impressed by her efforts, the magazine asked her to write a camera department and paid her with new photographic equipment. A year later, Outing magazine hired her to do similar work.

• Encouraged by these accomplishments, she turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, The Song of the Cardinal, met with modest success, but her next book, Freckles, established her tremendous popularity with the reading public. Despite critics' complaints that her work was overly sentimental and idealistic, Stratton-Porter continued to enjoy popular acclaim with works like A Girl of the Limberlost, Laddie, Michael O'Halloran, and A Daughter of the Land.

• In 1913, after the Limberlost Swamp had been drained, Stratton-Porter moved to northern Indiana where she built a new home - "The Cabin at Wildflower Woods" - on the shores of Sylvan Lake at Rome City. In 1920 she moved to California where she organized her own movie company and based a number of films on her books.

A Girl of the Limberlost, critic Janet Malcolm, describes,

• is a Cinderella story whose wicked stepmother, in an interesting twist, is the heroine's real mother. She is a crazy person, deranged by grief for a husband who was sucked into a quagmire before her eyes when she was pregnant with Elnora. Elnora grows up actively disliked by her mother — blamed for the death of the husband — and treated with harsh unkindness. The mother's derangement extends to her finances — she believes herself poor, though her land is full of valuable trees and has oil beneath its surface. Cutting down timber and drilling for oil would permit her to provide comfortably for Elnora. But she refuses to allow it. "Cut down Robert's trees! Tear up his land! Cover everything with horrid, greasy oil! I'll die first!" she says.

• Far from commending her for her environmental correctness, Stratton-Porter treats the mother's refusal to lumber and drill as a symptom of her madness. In 1909, commercial exploitation of the wilderness was as unexceptionable as pig farming and beekeeping. When the ecosystem of the actual Limberlost, where Stratton-Porter did her work on birds, was destroyed by lumbering and oil drilling, she simply moved her nature operations elsewhere; there was still plenty of elsewhere. And when the mother in the novel learns that the husband for whom she has been grieving for eighteen years was a philanderer, who drowned while sneaking home from an assignation, she demonstrates her return to sanity by expressing her willingness to "sell some timber and put a few oil wells where they don't show much."

Malcolm quotes from the book,

• He could see the throb of her breast under its thin covering and smell the fragrance of the tossing hair. He could see the narrow bed with its pieced calico cover, the whitewashed walls with gay lithographs, and every crevice stuck full of twigs with dangling cocoons. . . . But nothing was worth a glance save the perfect face and form within reach by one spring through the rotten mosquito bar. He gripped the limb above that on which he stood, licked his lips, and breathed through his throat to be sure he was making no sound.

This, she evaluates as being

• a measure of what children pick up without knowing exactly what they are taking in that my uninformed ten-year-old self grasped and was excited by the scene's obvious sense of sexual threat. Though not spelled out, the implications of "throb of her breast," "within reach by one spring," "licked his lips" were not lost on me. Of course, the rape is averted: Elnora starts talking to herself, as Stratton-Porter's characters are given to doing when she needs them to, and her innocent babble converts the would-be predator into a blubbering sentimental fool, who restores the money he has stolen from Elnora's hiding place in the Limberlost, and leaves her a note of warning against his fellow lowlifes.

During her lifetime, Stratton-Porter's novels sold over 7,000,000 copies, and the poor farm girl had become a millionaire.

Religion

Malcolm notes that Stratton-Porter once wrote to a reader, who asked what church she belonged to, replied that she

• didn't go to church because "I prefer to continue in the relationship I feel is established between me and my Creator through a lifetime of nature study."

She went on:

• I would advocate holding services out-of-doors in summer, giving as my reason that God so manifests Himself in the trees, flowers, and grass that to be among His creations puts one in a devotional frame of mind, gives better air to breathe, and puts worship on a natural basis, as it was in the beginning, when Christ taught the people beside the sea and in the open.

• And yet when Freckles exclaims, "Do you suppose Heaven is any finer than that?" he is not talking about a forest glade in spring carpeted with violets and hepatica, but about the "polished floors, sparkling glass, and fine furnishings" of the Bird Woman's house during a party, when it is "all ablaze with lights, perfumed with flowers, and filled with elegantly dressed people."

One of her biographers, Judith Reick Long, wrote that Stratton-Porter never revised or cut. A sermon in The Harvester illustrates the crackpottery of the period.

Racial theories were a central theme of what Malcolm has called "a noxious novel", Her Father's Daughter. In it she embraces the hatred for Chinese and Japanese immigrants, having its seventeen-year-old heroine, Linda Strong, say,

• The white man has dominated by his colour so far in the history of the world, but it is written in the Books that when the men of colour acquire our culture and combine it with their own methods of living and rate of production, they are going to bring forth greater numbers, better equipped for the battle of life, than we are. When they have got our last secret, constructive or scientific, they will take it, and living in a way that we would not, reproducing in numbers we don't, they will beat us at any game we start, if we don't take warning while we are in the ascendancy, and keep there.

And this:

• There's an undercurrent of something deep and subtle going on in this country right now. . . . If California does not wake up very shortly and very thoroughly she is going to pay an awful price for the luxury she is experiencing while she pampers herself with the service of the Japanese, just as the South has pampered herself for generations with the service of the negroes. When the negroes learn what there is to know, then the day of retribution will be at hand.

The plot of Her Father's Daughter

• revolves around a Japanese A-student in a Los Angeles high school, named Oka Sayye, who is actually a forty-year-old man planted there by the Japanese government for God knows what reason, but who is clearly such a threat to the white world that in the end he has to be remorselessly pushed off a cliff by the heroine's Irish housekeeper.

"I'm not kidding," comments Malcolm.

• Suspecting that Oka Sayye is not what he pretends to be, and in any case incensed by the very thought of a nonwhite leading the class, Linda reproaches another A-student named (yes) Donald Whiting for his supine acceptance of second place. She taunts him with the idea

that a boy as big as you and as strong as you and with as good brain and your opportunities has allowed a little brown Jap to cross the Pacific Ocean and in a totally strange country to learn a language foreign to him, and, with the same books and the same chances, to beat you at your own game. Donald meekly asks, "Linda, tell me how I can beat that little cocoanut-headed Jap."

Continues Malcolm:

• In this atrocious book (I said that The Harvester was Stratton-Porter's worst book because this one is really in a different league), Stratton-Porter puts her talent for describing desirable consumer objects to the task of describing undesirable racial traits: "I have never seen anything so mask-like as the stolid little square head on that Jap," Linda says to Donald. "I have never seen anything I dislike more than the oily, stiff, black hair standing up on it like menacing bristles."

Following the Los Angeles traffic accident that killed her, in which a streetcar rammed into one of her two chauffeur-driven limousines, Stratton-Porter was buried in Hollywood Cemetery. She had just finished The Keeper of the Bees at her new 14-room redwood vacation house on Catalina Island while awaiting the completion of an 11,000-square-foot, 11-room Tudor style mansion in Bel Air.

In 1999, her body and that of her daughter were buried on the grounds of the Gene Stratton-Porter Historic Site in Rome City, Indiana.

Books

The Song of the Cardinal (1903, novel)

Freckles (1904, novel)

What I Have Done with Birds (1907, novel)

At the Foot of the Rainbow (1907, novel)

Birds of the Bible (1909, novel)

A Girl of the Limberlost (1909, novel)

The Harvester (1911, novel)

The Fire Bird (1922, poetry)