Edna Ferber's America

The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780--1860

Eliza McGraw

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780807151907
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the 1910s to the 1950s, Edna Ferber (1885--1968) published a series of bestselling novels that made her one of Doubleday's highest-paid authors, earned her a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1925, and transformed her into a literary celebrity. She hosted dinner parties covered by the New York Times, lunched at the Algonquin Round Table with Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, and collaborated with George S. Kaufman on hit plays such as Dinner at Eight and Stage Door. In Edna Ferber's America, Eliza McGraw provides the first in-depth critical study of the author's novels, exploring their innovative portrayals of characters from a diverse range of ethnicities and social classes.
Best remembered today for the movies and musicals adapted from her works -- including classics like Giant and Show Boat -- Ferber attracted a devoted readership during her lifetime with engaging storylines focused on strong-willed individuals reshaping their lives, set amid a panorama of regional landscapes. McGraw reveals that Ferber's novels convey a broad, nuanced vision of the United States as a multiethnic country.
Framing her study with the theme of ethnic unease and insecurity, McGraw performs close readings of twelve Ferber novels: Dawn O'Hara (1911), Fanny Herself (1917), The Girls (1921), So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926), Cimarron (1929), American Beauty (1931), Come and Get It (1935), Saratoga Trunk (1941), Great Son (1945), Giant (1952), and Ice Palace (1958). McGraw explores the entwined topics of racial mixing and class as she argues that in Ferber's America, ethnic and social mobility challenge the reigning order, creating places that foster vitality and promise hope for the future.

1

THE GIRLS

Dawn O’Hara and Fanny Herself

DAUNTLESS TRAVELING SALESWOMAN Emma McChesney made Edna Ferber famous. She appeared in books such as the 1913 Roast Beef, Medium, the 1914 Personality Plus, and the 1915 Emma McChesney and Co. as well as onstage in the 1915 play Our Ms. McChesney. She traveled the country, doling out lingerie samples and advice in equal portions. Emma was widely beloved. Theodore Roosevelt appreciated her as “[a]n immensely vital woman,” but he did wish Emma would get married, Ferber wrote in her 1939 autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure (77). In the stage versions of Ferber’s stories, Ethel Barrymore portrayed Emma, to whom Ferber’s mother Julia referred as “Julia McFerber.”

Emma’s resemblance to Julia—independent, well-spoken, full of saleslady gumption—was not accidental. She was a deracinated and more upbeat version of Ferber’s mother, writes Julie Gilbert (1978, 424). Just as Emma’s name avoids the Jewishness that the surname “Ferber” exposes, ethnicity lurks in rather than shapes the Emma McChesney books; in the 1913 Roast Beef, Medium, Emma is offered a business opportunity by a “sallow, dark man” named Abe Fromkin, and she also works with a group of variously classified factory girls. The more persistent theme of these works, however, is Emma’s determination and tireless pluck, the qualities that sold books and made Ferber’s a household name.

People wanted to know about the woman behind Emma McChesney, and Ferber told them. Ferber believed strongly in the value of a businesswoman in society, as she told a reporter—Joyce Kilmer, of “Trees” fame—in 1915. “The butcher and the grocer and the candle-stickmaker can do what they like with the clinging vine sort of wife and mother. But they can’t put much over on the wife and mother who spends six to seven hours a day in an up-to-date business office’” (1915, SM4). That same article pointed out what Ferber and Emma were up against, since Kilmer wrote that Ferber was a “daintily clad, whimsical young woman” who “looks ridiculously young” (SM4). Kilmer reminded Ferber that she had been called the inheritor of O. Henry’s mantle. Her response: “When O. Henry heard that, he must have laughed” (SM5). F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew Bruccoli writes, added a pointed reference to ethnic background when he referred to Ferber and Fannie Hurst as “the Yiddish descendants of O. Henry” (2009, 95).

Sometimes Ferber was regarded as more than a “woman author,” but, as Fitzgerald’s comment indicates, she was always a Jew. And as a novelist, Ferber herself invited ethnicity into her work more than in the McChesney stories. With her longer works, she confronts bolder themes. In both the 1911 Dawn O’Hara and the 1917 Fanny Herself, the novels bracketing McChesney’s heyday, Ferber applies the idea of strong womanhood so evident in her McChesney stories, and adds generous doses of autobiography. Dawn O’Hara is the story of a newspaperwoman, as Ferber was, and Fanny Brandeis is, like Ferber, the daughter of midwestern storekeepers. With Dawn, Emma, and Fanny, Ferber blazed a path for heroines who refused constraint by either novelistic or societal conventions. Like Emma McChesney, Dawn and Fanny must work for a living. These novels complicate that societally transgressive fact further, taking Ferber’s autobiographical aspects and situating them in a larger, more systematically problematized context. Both Dawn and Fanny experience an America framed by ethnic categorization. They consistently find new ways in which their ethnicity makes them American inasmuch as it frames their own understanding of difference.

In A Peculiar Treasure, Ferber writes that she almost burned Dawn O’Hara, but her mother insisted she save it. The book was the product of a nervous breakdown Ferber suffered, and although she may have wanted to destroy it at one point, it sold well, and she evidently appreciated her mother’s rescue of the manuscript. She also managed to connect the writing and breakdown in a way that shows her synthesis of life and writing when she told the writer of a “Who’s Who Among Women of Big Achievement,” column in the Washington Herald that she was actually glad she’d had the episode. It gave her the time, she told reporter Mary Mullett in 1914, to write Dawn O’Hara, a self-referential book about a woman reporter who has a nervous breakdown (1914, 8).

The novel is a heavily plotted story that includes romance, danger, and even some horror-show moments—Ferber later assessed it in A Peculiar Treasure as “sentimental and schoolgirly” (1939, 143)—but holds real complexity. The optimistically named Dawn is an Irish American woman whose appearance invites comments such as “if your [name] isn’t Shaughnessy or Burke at least, then I’m no judge of what black hair and gray eyes stand for,” which earns the retort of “‘it happens to be O’Hara—Dawn O’Hara, if ye plaze’” (1911, 6). The American-born Dawn apes an Irish accent to emphasize her ethnicity, signaled both by her physical appearance and her accent. Dawn is thankful for her “Irish deftness” (145); she addresses herself in a brogue, “‘Begorra! ’Tis losin’ your sense av humor you’re after doing’!” (187) and refers to her niece and nephew as the Spalpeens, a word that came to mean “rascal,” but originally referred to migrant Irish workers.

While parading her Irish identity as jaunty and jovial, Dawn keeps a dark, Brontësque secret—a mentally unstable husband named Peter Orme, whom she has had placed in an asylum. “Well, one does not seek a divorce from a husband who is insane,” Dawn tartly informs the reader (1911, 11). One does, however, take his job: Dawn returns to writing to support Peter. But working sickens Dawn, and she experiences a true nervous breakdown, something that had happened to Ferber in 1909: “The sight of a fly on the wall was enough to make me burst into a passion of sobs” (17). Like the novel itself, Dawn hides her introspection under a veneer of jollity. Dawn recuperates at her sister Norah’s house, and Norah finds a German psychiatrist named Ernst Von Gerhart to work with Dawn. His advent initiates a discussion of Germanness, the other identity that comes to pervade the novel.

Von Gerhard feels that Dawn should give up writing for the sake of her health, and she replies that she considers herself a writer: “All of which is most unwomanly; for is not marriage woman’s highest aim, and home her true sphere? … I was meant to be an old maid, like the terrible Kitty O’Hara. Not one of the tatting and tea kind, but an impressive, bustling old girl, with a double chin. The sharp-tongued Kitty O’Hara used to say that being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling” (49) Dawn’s complicated approach to the idea of women’s work turns preconceived notions about what is desirable for women—a home, children, a husband—upside down, since she finds becoming an “impressive, bustling old girl” more appealing. Beyond a simple message of equal rights, however, Dawn puts forth the notion that her difference—both from being a writer and living outside the domestic realm—stems from an ethnic root. Her disinclination toward inhabiting the “true sphere” is in her Irish blood, tracing back to Kitty, notably an ancestor on her paternal, unladylike side.

Further, Dawn’s anticipation of the argument of true spheres, to the point that she even differentiates between “tatting and tea” and “bustling old girl” sorts of unmarried women, evinces a complex matrix of womanhood. “Norah has pleaded with me to be more like other women of my age, and for her sake I’ve tried” (49). She feels different, and “impressive,” like the old Irish maid she emulates. “‘Any woman can have a husband and babies…. But mighty few women can write a book. It’s a special curse’” (225), she says. The refrain of the word “curse” to define her societally atypical choices demonstrates Dawn’s awareness of the counter-cultural decisions she makes, and seems to imply that there is some sort of otherworldly rationale behind it—a “curse” rather than a choice.

Although part of his curative regimen for Dawn includes outdoor exercise, something Ferber herself loved and found restorative—and the two of them literally run hand-in-hand down the country lanes near Norah’s house—Von Gerhard becomes Dawn’s vector back into the diverse, urban streetscape she craves in order to fulfill these culturally atypical longings. She returns to his hometown of Milwaukee to write, and finds the German population of the city, as well as a new newspaper job, provides her desired stimulation. In Milwaukee, Germanness enriches Dawn’s experience, demonstrating the multiplicity of American cities and the healthfulness of ethnic heterogeneity, which proves to serve Dawn as well as her country hikes. Dawn lives in a boarding house with German people, and remarks: “Types! I never dreamed that such faces existed outside of the old German woodcuts that one sees illustrating time-yellowed books” (79). Identity categorization provides Dawn with a way to navigate her new and plural community.

Not all of her characterizations are complimentary: Dawn anthropologically terms the German people as “aborigines” who have “bulging, knobby foreheads and bristling pompadours” (81). One wears a “bristling pompadour and [has] very small pig-eyes” (83). The German neighbors’ untamed hair, marked by the wild beard and the highly styled pompadours that nevertheless “bristle,” along with the animalistic “pig-eyes” coupled with the word “aborigine” suggest that Dawn sees the German boarders as somehow pre-civilized, pre-dating even her own Irish family’s association with America. Her classification of their “bulging, knobby” foreheads seems an attempt to capture the ethnic high ground. None of this, however, dissuades Dawn from appreciating Milwaukee: “I felt that I was going to like it, aborigines and all” (84). Dawn’s statement demonstrates the import and vitality stemming necessarily from living with a mixed group of people.

Indeed, German Milwaukee, with its variegated community, becomes a sort of extension of Von Gerhard’s ability to restore Dawn’s health. She admires what she sees as Germans’ hale bluffness, and is astonished to see a sign on a bakery proclaiming that English is spoken within, reversing the notion that English is the default language of America’s streets. In this context, Dawn serves as a prototype for later Ferber characters such as Leslie Lynnton, who marvels wide-eyed at the Mexican influence in Texas in the 1952 novel Giant. While Ferber well understands and describes the blends that make up America’s various regions, pockets of ethnic or regional identity often shock her characters, highlighting the multiplicity of the American landscape. For her part, Dawn eventually realizes that the German-influenced Milwaukee in the novel is as much a part of America as the bucolic country lanes she wanders at her sister’s house, and that she finds both invigorating. Despite Dawn’s enthusiasm, her jaded editor at the newspaper finds Milwaukee’s German-immersion factor uninteresting. “‘But man alive, this is America!’” (1911, 91), Dawn protests, sounding much like Ferber in the more sweeping passages of her autobiographies. The editor replies, “‘This isn’t America. This is Milwaukee’” (91). Dawn’s insistence upon Milwaukee, with its German culture, as America demonstrates her embrace of the German influence, and its fulfillment of her yen for difference.

Another non-German, the paper’s sports editor Blackie Griffith, helps guide Dawn through the German neighborhoods of Milwaukee on her odyssey. Blackie’s character is based upon a real sports editor named Wallie Rowland, whom Ferber knew as a reporter in Milwaukee. Blackie’s use of slang, his color-based name, and his Welsh identity all contrast with the Germanic city around him, sealing his difference and allying him with the non-German Dawn. Dawn sees Blackie as slightly inhuman: “a fantastic, elfin little figure … [a] little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair and his deep-set, uncanny black eyes” (92), or “an amiable brown gnome, or a cheerful little joss-house god come to life” (98), with the idea of the joss-house, or Chinese folk temple, cementing Blackie’s identity as different. For his part, Blackie refers to his own “‘Spanish style of beauty’” (121), but the “hot, painful red dyeing Blackie’s sallow face” betrays his unrequited love for Dawn (276).

Blackie exposes Dawn to German life at a bakery where “[t]here was nothing about the place or its occupants to remind one of America. This dim, smoky, cake-scented café was Germany” (111). How to assimilate this seeming contradiction preoccupies Dawn’s Milwaukee experience, with the bakery, in which Dawn must gesture and draw pictures to order the pastries she wants, as a symbol. Mostly, Dawn marvels at how no other patrons find their surroundings queer, and Blackie responds, “‘Sure not; that’s the beauty of it. They don’t need to make no artificial atmosphere for this place; it just grows wild, like dandelions” (116). Blackie’s observation demonstrates his plural worldview. In his mind, there is nothing anomalous about a German-only bakery in the midst of the American heartland. Its organic appearance from the German community makes it natural, as his weed metaphor emphasizes. Indeed, Blackie chooses Germany as a vacation spot, “knowin’ that it would feel homelike there” (102). Blackie’s Welshness keeps him alongside Dawn as an outsider in Milwaukee, a position he seems more at ease maintaining than she does. Ultimately, Dawn and Blackie decide “we’re not caring so long as we approve of one another” (252), underscoring the need each has for some sort of communal society.

Dawn also befriends her German fellow-boarders, particularly the women. The “lady aborigines,” as she thinks of them, admire Dawn’s clothing and request her help selecting their own wardrobes. This plot-line becomes a commentary on the anything-can-happen nature of American society, as Dawn at first plays the role of a lady bountiful, doling out clothes and fashion advice. One beneficiary has fled Germany because of a star-crossed marriage to a lower-class man. But he disapproves of the new clothes. “[I]n Amerika all things are different,” she says (152). With her spunk, this woman becomes, in Dawn’s estimation, “the plucky little aborigine who, with the donning of the new Amerikanische gown had acquired some real Amerikanische nerve” (154). Like Dawn, Frau Nirlanger flaunts convention, and this sequence inverts the American bootstrap myth—Frau Nirlanger loses social status by immigrating—and also reinforces the notion of equality in what is still enough of a shifting, categorized country that Dawn considers herself an Irishwoman in a German city. The “aborigine” is really an Austrian noblewoman, but Dawn imagines her as uncivilized. Dawn also describes her as “plucky” and “little,” words easily applied to a new immigrant who adapts quickly to her new country and makes good. Milwaukee may seem German, but it’s not, really. Instead, it takes America itself to give Frau Nirlanger “nerve.” America becomes the great leveler, bringing the Austrian aristocrat to her husband’s more plebian caste. At the same time, it gives the noblewoman the ability to transcend and simultaneously use her elevated class and acquired nerve to take on her husband.

Dawn is saved from internalizing this lesson when her husband Peter returns, and the novel concludes with a predictable tragedy that leaves Dawn free to marry Von Gerhard. In Dawn O’Hara, healthful mixture requires a German American man (and city) combined with an Irish American heroine. With Dawn’s acclimatization of Germanness in both location and spouse, Ferber moves toward the concept of heterogeneity as strengthening rather than diluting. Both participants are notably white, while future novels included both cultural and ethnic blending, but with the happy couple poised to initiate a dynasty of nationally hybridized children, the novel nevertheless prefigures the plots of many of Ferber’s regional novels. “‘Coming, Kindchen?’” (302), Von Gerhard asks Dawn at the end of the book, his German endearment setting the stage for her future as a part of the German community.

If Ferber acknowledged such Dawn O’Hara moments as the character of Blackie and the locale of Brumbach’s as direct allusions her own experience, Fanny Herself pushes much farther into autobiography. At one point in her actual autobiography A Peculiar Treasure, rather than describe an episode, Ferber simply reprints a passage from Fanny Herself. As she writes, “A good deal of it was imaginary, a good deal of it was real” (1939, 202). There is, however, more to the novel than a simple reprisal of Ferber’s coming of age. For one, Fanny Herself includes some particularly self-conscious moments of departure from the Emma McChesney books, most notably when Emma herself appears as a cameo, stopping through Fanny’s family’s store on a sales call (1917, 90). In an almost postmodern touch, Ferber writes of a character’s brogue, “There shall be no vain attempt to set it down. Besides, you always skip dialect” (118). Ferber pokes fun at her own earlier writing; she understands what hackneyed phrases (a staple of the six-years-previous Dawn O’Hara) a more sophisticated reader—the reader of Fanny Herself—will “always skip.”

More importantly, Fanny Herself deals frankly with Fanny’s ethnicity and offers explicit and complicated images of American Jewishness. In an article in MELUS, Carol Batker calls Fanny Herself Ferber’s “most Jewish novel” (2000, 91). The text offers a complex reading of Jewishness, including descriptions of passing and anti-Semitism, and explodes some stereotypes along the way. When it was published, readers understood its Jewish characterizations to uphold derogatory labels. “Mother and daughter are fine women; the son’s lack of consideration of them may be the Jewish attitude toward women,” wrote the anonymous reviewer in a New York Sun article called “Critical Reviews of the Season’s Latest Fiction.” (1917, 6). Nevertheless, the review sees Fanny Herself as the “best and most substantial work she [Ferber] has turned out” (6).

Fanny Herself stands as an argument for Jewish diversity, upending societally dictated generalizations and pointing the way toward a future where there are as many different American Jews as there are Americans. The novel tells the story of Fanny Brandeis, the daughter of storekeepers in a midwestern town dubbed Winnebago. As in Ferber’s own life, Fanny’s father is infirm, and her mother runs the family dry-goods store. Their town is small, with Fanny and one friend “the only two in her room at school who stayed out on the Day of Atonement” (1917, 24), but large enough to support a local synagogue. Jewishness is a fundamental part of Fanny’s identity as a “sensitive, highly-organized, dramatic little Jewish girl,” an “emotional little Jewess” (29), and “a little Jew girl, with whole centuries of suffering behind one” (42).

Ferber calls Fanny a “little Oriental” (25) a reference to Jewishness to which she returns in the 1930 novel Cimarron, and which provides an opening into a much larger context. In their introduction to Orientalism and the Jews, Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar write, “The romantic image of a noble oriental Jew” cropped up from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, and Ferber’s use of the term ‘oriental’ for her Jewish characters resonates within this tradition” (2005, xviii). According to Kalmar and Penslar, “On the Jewish side, [orientalism] was seized upon by a desire to proclaim the Jews as a ‘race’ or ‘nation’ of great antiquity, ennobled by its association with the Bible, but also more generally with the Orient as the source of spiritual inspiration for the West” (xxviii). Although Ferber was, of course, American, her use of the word reveals an inheritance of a European “bourgeois” tradition. This image of the oriental, noble Jew, which Ferber paraphrases in her autobiographies, motivates not only her characters but also the ethnically concerned novels themselves. In later works, the concept of the “oriental,” or ancient and respected culture, pervades ethnic groups beyond Jews, as one of Ferber’s consistently allusive points of rhetoric re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Girls: Dawn O’Hara and Fanny Herself
• 2. Wheat and Emeralds: The Girls and So Big
• 3. A Pinprick of Blood: Show Boat
• 4. The Cowboys, the Indians, and the Jew: Cimarron
• 5. Coloring the Blue Bloods: American Beauty and Come and Get It
• 6. Passing Fancy: Saratoga Trunk
• 7. Big Spaces, Big Problems: Giant
• Conclusion: The Great White North, Great Son and Ice Palace
• Works Cited
• Index