Response 1: E__ C__: Semantic Truncations & Romantic Triangulations in the Limberlost

As Christoph Irmscher suggested, the E__ C__ name initializing phenomenon in Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl in the Limberlost is too uncannily symbolic to be merely coincidental:  E[lnora] C[omstock], E[dith] C[arr], E[lvira] C[arney].  Each of these E__ C__ initialized women participates in a triangulated relationship.    

     Elnora Comstock                                        Kate Comstock

            /                \                                          /                             \

Edith Carr  --  Philip Ammon            Elvira Carney  --  Robert Comstock


Edith Carr, the neurotic socialite, and Elvira Carney, the adulterous desire object, are the "other" women in relation to Elnora and Kate Comstock respectively.  The progressive idealization of Elnora as a type of naturalist Angel of the House, who [uneasily] embodies the opposition between the (positive) economic value and (negative) life-threatening danger aspects of the Limberlost swamp, promises to neutralize the respective desire threats that the other two women just as uneasily embody (Edith Carr = enervating economic overinvestment; Elvira Carney = punishing adulterous desire).  Elnora's uneasy embodiment of this specific opposition, together with the signifying volatility of "E__ C__," emerges at the beginning of the novel when "Comstock" morphs into "Cornstock" and thereafter "Cornstalk" (see Response 2).  Thus "E__ C__" can be read as a metonymic signifier cluster for a complicating (and implicating) desire that underlies A Girl in the Limberlost.

It can be speculated that James Joyce was familiar with A Girl in the Limberlost whose publication year predates his own bildungsroman novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by approximately five years.  Throughout A Portrait (and especially in Chapter 2) "E__ C__" functions as the signifier cluster for Stephen's romanticized adolescent desire for the elusive E[mma] C[leary] that generates the intense ambivalence, ironically driving him to the Nighttown prostitute's threshold.  Thus it would be no surprise if Joyce's "E__ C__" were just as intentional as Stratton-Porter's, especially considering that Joyce and Stratton-Porter were contemporaries.