Gene Stratton-Porter (Notes, Class 1)

 

Gene Stratton-Porter (Chronology)

 

1863    b. 17 August on a 240-acre farm, Lagro, Wabash County, IN.  Youngest of twelve children
            of Mark Stratton (farmer and Methodist minister) and Mary Schallenberger Stratton.  Mark 
            and Mary were married for almost thirty years.

1874    After the death of her elder brother, Leander, the Strattons sold their farm, and moved to
           Wabash IN.

1875    Mary Stratton died four months after the move to Wabash.

1881    Traveled with her sisters Ada and Florence to Rome City on Sylvan Lake for her first
            Chautauqua meeting (i.e. a cultural event at which lecturers and entertainers addressed a
            variety of subjects that included natural history, religion, and literature).

1886    (21 April)  Married Charles Darwin Porter (pharmacist).  

1887    b. 27 August--Jeannette, their only daughter.

1895    Construction of Limberlost Cabin completed.  This 14-room cabin was the most elaborate home in Geneva IN, situated on the edge of Limberlost Swamp.  Limberlost Cabin provided a space where Gene S-P could focus on writing, photography, and natural history.

1903    First book, The Song of the Cardinal: A Love Story published by Bobbs-Merrill.

1904    Freckles published by Doubleday, Page (became bestseller).

1909    A Girl of the Limberlost (Doubleday, Page; sequel to Freckles).

1911    The Harvester (Doubleday, Page; dedicated to Thoreau; most copies sold of all her books).

1919    (October)  Journeyed to Los Angeles CA for a six-month rest after her health suffered from the influenza epidemic of 1918.

 1922    Formed own film production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions (i.e. her books were being made into movies by this time).  G. S-P Productions resulted from dissatisfaction that Paramount ignored all the directorial suggestions they had initially solicited form her for Freckles (1917).  

1924    (6 December)  Stratton-Porter died in an automobile accident, Los Angeles.

 1928    The Lady of the Limberlost: The Life and Letters of Gene Stratton-Porter published by Doubleday, Doran (biography and correspondence compiled by her daughter Jeanette).

 Other Interesting Facts:

 • Stratton-Porter trained herself in photography.  She developed such fine prints that the Eastman

Kodak Company sent an executive to observe her methods. 

• She eventually served as photographic editor of Recreation for two years and worked for four years

as a specialist in natural history photography forPhotographic Times Annual Almanac.  She

frequently endured discomfort and physical danger in the process of photographing her subjects.  For

example, she would walk with heavy photographic equipment through the swamp, at times sinking

into the mire while being severely bitten by insects every day for three weeks to take pictures of a

black vulture nest.

• She rhapsodized thus re. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855): 

“If you believe in God; if you love the green grass, flowers, and trees; if you know
what the leaves whisper and the waters murmur and the birds sing; if you love God's
creation above man's manufacturing--read the book. If in your heart there is the throb
of universal love and pity; if your hand has lain on the bare body of man and it has not
frightened you, read the book. You will be better for it.”

• She claimed that women were more suited to study nature in Friends in Feathers by saying that “in the matter of finesse in approaching the birds, in limitless patience in awaiting the exact moment for the best exposure, in the tedious and delicate processes of the dark room, in the art of winning bird babies and parents, it is not a man's work. No man ever has had the patience to remain with a bird until he secured a real character study of it.”  

•  She deplored the methods of naturalist John James Audubon, who clubbed his subjects to death before studying them.  In the article “The Camera in Ornithology” (1903), she noted that Audubon's drawings looked “as if they had been cut out with a scroll saw.”

Writings by Gene Stratton-Porter:

BOOKS

• The Strike at Shane's: A Prize Story of Indiana, attributed to Stratton-Porter (Boston: American Humane Education Society, 1893).
• The Song of the Cardinal: A Love Story (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1903; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913).
• Freckles (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1904; London: Doubleday, Page, 1904).
• At the Foot of the Rainbow (New York: Outing, 1907; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913).
• What I Have Done with Birds: Character Studies of Native American Birds (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1907); revised and enlarged as Friends in Feathers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1917; London: Curtis Brown, 1917).
• A Girl of the Limberlost (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1909; London: Doubleday, Page, 1909).
• Birds of the Bible (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham / New York: Eaton & Mains, 1909; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910).
• Music of the Wild: With Reproductions of the Performers, Their Instruments and Festival Halls (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham / New York: Eaton & Mains, 1910; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910).
• The Harvester (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1911; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911).
• After the Flood (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1911).
• Moths of the Limberlost (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1912; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912).
• Laddie: A True Blue Story (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1913; London: Murray, 1913).
• Birds of the Limberlost (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1914).
• Michael O'Halloran (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1915; London: Murray, 1915).
• Morning Face (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1916; London: Murray, 1916).
• A Daughter of the Land (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1918; London: Murray, 1918).
• Homing with the Birds: The History of a Lifetime of Personal Experience with the Birds (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1919; London: Murray, 1919).
• Her Father's Daughter (Garden City, N.Y. & Toronto: Doubleday, Page, 1921; London: Murray, 1919).
• The Fire Bird (Garden City, N.Y. & Toronto: Doubleday, Page, 1922; London: Murray, 1922).
• The White Flag (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1923; London: Murray, 1923).
• Wings (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1923).
• Jesus of the Emerald (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1923; London: Murray, 1923).
• The Keeper of the Bees (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925; London: Hutchinson, 1925).
• Tales You Won't Believe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925; London: Heinemann, 1925).
• The Magic Garden (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927; London: Hutchinson, 1927).
• Let Us Highly Resolve (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927; London: Heinemann, 1927).
• Euphorbia (Berne, Ind.: Light and Life Press, 1986).
• Coming through the Swamp: The Nature Writings of Gene Stratton-Porter, edited by Sydney Landon Plum (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996).

OTHER

• “The Camera in Ornithology,” in The American Annual of Photography and Photographic Times-Bulletin Almanac for 1904, edited by W. I. Lincoln Adams (New York: Scoville Manufacturing, 1903), pp. 51-68.

SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS-- UNCOLLECTED

• “A New Experience in Millinery,” Recreation (February 1900): 115.
• “Laddie, the Princess, and the Pie,” Metropolitan (September 1901): 416, 421.
• “How Laddie and the Princess Spelled Down at the Christmas Bee,” Metropolitan (December 1901): 739-753.
• “The Real Babes in the Woods,” Metropolitan (August 1902): 201-213.
• “Why I Wrote ‘A Girl of the Limberlost,’” Recreation (February 1910): 145-147.
• “The Gift of the Birds,” Youth’s Companion (19 March 1914): 147-148; (26 March 1914): 159-160.
• “My Work and My Critics,” Bookman (London), 49 (February 1916): 147-155.
• “My Life and My Books,” Ladies’ Home Journal, 33 (September 1916): 13, 80-81.
• “Why I Always Wear My Rose Colored Glasses,” American Magazine, 88 (August 1919): 36-37, 112, 114-115, 118, 121.
• “My Ideal Home,” Country Life in America, 60 (October 1921): 40-43.
• “Books for Busy People,” McCall’s (January 1924): 2, 28, 74.
• “What My Father Meant to Me,” American Magazine, 99 (February 1925): 23, 70, 72, 76.
• “Shall Girls Pay Their Way?” McCall’s, 52 (August 1925): 2, 48.
• “Making Your Vote Count for Something,” McCall’s (November 1925): 2, 67.
• “A Message to the Working Woman,” McCall’s (July 1926): 2, 68.

MOVIES/MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

·         Michael O'Halloran (also see below), Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, 1923, Republic Pictures, 1937, Windsor Pictures, 1948.

·         A Girl of the Limberlost (also see below), Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, 1924, Monogram Pictures, 1934, Columbia Pictures, 1945.

·         Keeper of the Bees, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, 1925, Monogram Pictures, 1935, Columbia Pictures, 1947.

·         Laddie, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, 1926, RKO Pictures, 1935, and 1940.

·         Any Man's Wife (based on Michael O'Halloran), Republic Pictures, 1937.

·         Romance of the Limberlost (based on A Girl of the Limberlost), Monogram Pictures, 1938.

·         Her First Romance, Columbia Pictures, 1951.

·         Freckles, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1960.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• Bakerman, Jane S., essay in American Women Writers, four volumes, edited by Lina Mainiero, Ungar, 1979-82.
• Brunswick, Kenneth, Map of the Limberlost, Limberlost Swamp Remembered (Geneva, IL), 1993.
• Finney, Jan Dearmin, Gene Stratton-Porter, the Natural Wonder: Surviving Photographs of the Great Limberlost Swamp, Indiana State Museum, 1985.
• Hart, James D., The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 4th edition, Oxford University Press, 1965.
• Long, Judith Reick, Gene Stratton-Porter: Novelist and Naturalist, Indiana Historical Society (Indianapolis), 1990.
• McGrath, Joan, essay in Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, 2nd edition, edited by Leslie Henderson, St. James Press, 1990, pp. 525-26.
• Meehan, Jeanette Porter, The Lady of the Limberlost: The Life and Letters of Gene Stratton-Porter, Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
• Morrow, Barbara Olenyik, Nature’s Storyteller: The Life of Gene Stratton-Porter, Indiana Historical Society Press (Indianapolis), 2010.
• Plum, Sydney Landon, ed., Coming Through the Swamp: The Nature Writings of Gene Stratton Porter, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City), 1996.
• Stratton-Porter, Laddie: A True-Blue Story, Doubleday, Page, 1913.

Biographical Source for Hand-Out

Literature Resource Center.  Gale Cengage Learning.  Accessed 14 Apr. 2013.

Fig. 1  Limberlost Cabin

                                         

Fig. 2  Title page, A Girl of the Limberlost, early ed.

 

Points for Discussion (Chapters I-VII, pp. 1-121):

• Significance of naming/name change:  “Comstock” à “Cornstock” à “Cornstalk” (pp. 10-11, 49).  Elnora’s family name is signifier for her unfixed status at this point in the novel.  How does this name change phenomenon compare with the mutability of “Queequeg” in Moby Dick?

• The Limberlost swamp as a hybrid, ambiguous locus of multiple meanings:

-          Elnora’s inheritance from Freckles (18).

-          Source of income (87).

-          Locus of death (i.e. for Robert Comstock, “I hate it like death,” 101).

• Country vs. city as recurrent oppositional motif (former is idealized): 
Country = locus of innocence where nature promises holistic regeneration.

City = locus of greater unhealthiness and corruption.

“We Limberlost people must not be selfish with the wonders God has given to us.  We must share with these poor cooped-up city people the best we can.  To send them a beautiful book, that is the way, is it not, little new friend of mine?” (Bird Woman, p. 50).

• Elnora as subject of female bildungsroman vs. Elnora as object of male gaze.

Latter first occurs with the voyeuristic Pete Corson scene (Chapter IV, pp. 78-81). 


Points for Observation (p. 121+):

As narrative progresses, Elnora is increasingly idealized (i.e. in Victorian “Angel of the House” terms).  Thus the nature that she personifies is proportionally idealized (i.e. the value/danger opposition of the Limberlost swamp is uneasily resolved in her one person). 

Edith Carr emerges as Elnora’s alter ego, especially in garments recalling the Yellow Emperor moth (pp. 355-56).  The valuable Yellow Emperor is the signifier for Elnora (as object of Philip Ammon’s desire) and for her college-bound aspirations—Edith Carr emerges as the personifying spectacle of this signifier.  Thereafter, the alter ego affinity between Elnora and Edith culminates when Edith presents Elnora with a captured Yellow Emperor specimen (475).

The culminating identification with the Yellow Emperor moth on the part of both women brings with it the idealized victory of country/nature over city/artifice, together with the reinscription of traditional gender ideals—i.e. of woman as supportive domestic partner and home-maker for the working man--e.g. Edith Carr to Hart Henderson:  “You find out what you want to do, and be, that is a man’s work in the world, and I will plan our home, with no thought save your comfort” (474).