"Pretty Soon She'll Be Anywheres On Puget Sound But Where She Ought To Be": White Female Mobility and Agency in Ella Rhoads Higginson's _Mariella, of Out-West_

The undertheorized status of Pacific Northwest writing in literary studies (Kollin, Cleman) has particular consequence for Western literary studies and revision of a masculine critical West. To improve the climate for... [ view full abstract ]

The undertheorized status of Pacific Northwest writing in literary studies (Kollin, Cleman) has particular consequence for Western literary studies and revision of a masculine critical West. To improve the climate for theorizing about Pacific Northwest writing, I take up this seminar call and employ feminist critical regionalism to examine ways that Ella Higginson’s once-celebrated novel Mariella, of Out-West (1902) presents “the West as literally a wind-blown zone of circulation, stasis, transfer, and exchange within the larger Pacific world.” Higginson’s depictions of the Pacific Northwest as significant in its climate dispute long nineteenth-century readings of the region as peripheral. That is, Higginson uses critical regionalism to place the Pacific Northwest in the larger Pacific world. To render this work visible, I seek to recover Higginson’s portrayals of the politics of female mobility and agency in Pacific Northwest working-class white women.

In Mariella, region is an element possessing singular features that significantly shape social and material climates of white women. Higginson imbricates late-nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest characteristics—isolation, vast territory, wild terrain—into working-class white women. Stormy and solitary as the underpopulated, economically unstable place they inhabit, Higginson’s women behave so disruptively that they must pause when temporarily “unable to struggle longer against the wind.” Their worldly suitors blow in on winds from across the Pacific and they circulate in male crowds. Though women are restricted by their limited means to this remote Western region, within these parameters, they are mobile and dynamic, grappling with regional climates and attending with rapt interest to transients from other climates/regions of the larger Pacific World.