Daughter of Earth

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Daughter of Earth
Cover of 1987 Edition Published by the Feminist Press
Author	Agnes Smedley
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Autobiographical novel
Publisher	Virago Press
Publication date	1929
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	228 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0860680037

Daughter of Earth (1929) is an autobiographical novel by the American author and journalist Agnes Smedley. An unexpurgated version was released 1935. The novel was reissued in 1973 and republished in 1987 by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York with a foreword by Alice Walker.

Contents 1 Plot Introduction 2 Major Characters 3 Plot Outline 4 Major Themes 5 Critical Reception 6 Quotes 7 References 8 Footnotes

[edit] Plot Introduction

Daughter of Earth is a fictionalized autobiographical account of Smedley's life. It follows the story of protagonist Marie Rogers as her family leaves an agrarian lifestyle for an urban industrial one and then, later, as Marie leaves the family to pursue her own education, eventually beginning a political life supporting India in its fight for independence.

According to Judith Kegan Gardiner, the following passage explains Marie's identification as a "daughter of earth": “They told me I was a white woman! So was my mother who also lay under the earth…so was Helen…so were all the Helens and the mothers of my class!” (326). Gardiner explains that Marie identifies with her mother and “accepts her symbolic daughterhood to a mother who was, like the earth of Marie’s childhood, poor and unable to feed its children” ^[1](151).

[edit] Major Characters

Marie Rogers - The protagonist of the story, believed to be a portrayal of Agnes Smedley herself. Raised in a poor farming community of Missouri in 1890, born to a Native American father, Marie Rogers forms her view of life from her early experiences of her abusive mother and a gallant but capricious father. She inherits her imagination from her father. Mired in hatred of marriage, sex, and love, she can’t fight her innate desire for passion. Guilt-ridden, she constantly comes in conflict with her self-imposed standards. Both her marriages fail. To avoid motherhood altogether, she gets an abortion. To gain economic independence and to rise above the humiliating servile existence of women around her, Marie pursues an education. An educated woman, she gains conscious understanding of working-class womanhood in America. As her struggle for equality crosses national boundaries, Marie assists an the Indian liberation cause and is temporarily imprisoned.

John Rogers - Marie's Father. A farmer on a Missouri farm, John moves from wood chopping to coal hauling in search of a better life. He comes and leaves his home at his whims. He is a good storyteller and has a reputation of a dangerous man with women.

Elly Rogers - Marie’s mother. Elly Rogers is an abused wife. The mother-daughter relationship changes as Marie grows up, yet it heavily influences Marie’s attitudes toward marriage and children. Often characterized in the novel by her rough hands, almost black from work, Elly works as a wash woman and later running a boarding house to support her family during her husband’s frequent absences. She dies at an early age.

Helen - Elly Roger’s beautiful younger sister. Helen, is strong, proud, independent, and loves life. She is admired and envied by both genders. Although once engaged to Annie’s husband, Sam, Helen never marries and makes her living as a prostitute, attracted by beautiful things, a better income than marriage offers, and the control prostitution allows her to have over her own body. When Marie’s father fails to provide for his family, Helen takes on the responsibility. Marie maintains a close relationship with her aunt, and when Helen is no longer young and enough to make a successful living as a prostitute, Marie helps provide for her.

Beatrice, George, and Dan - Marie’s three younger siblings. Beatrice, George, and Dan, are sent to work for families following their mother’s death. Ill-treated, they turn to their sister for help. While Marie supports Beatrice, helping her obtain an education, she lacks the resources to also provide for her brothers. George eventually dies in a ditch cave-in, and Dan serves in the military before going to live with his father and Sam.

Annie Rogers - Marie’s older sister. As a working woman, she holds her own in confrontations with her father. She marries Sam and makes a good wife. She dies in child birth.

Sam Walker - Sam is the son of Helen’s first employer. He marries Marie’s sister Annie and fathers her child. Later John Rogers and Dan also live with him in Oklahoma.

Big Buck - A large, quiet, and proud man-this one-time cowboy exudes the spirit of the West. A long-time family friend, he not only teaches the young Marie to shoot, lasso, and do tricks with a knife, but he encourages her to abandon feminine ways. He maintains a close relationship with Marie and helps her financially when she moves to Arizona.

Robert Hampton - A pen friend of Marie who sends his old books by mail. Marie idealizes him. His image is shattered as she finally meet him in person, finding out that their ideas are poles apart in terms of religion and freedom of women.

Karin Larsen - A statuesque Scandinavian woman from the East with a slight accent, and a limp, Karin is skeptical of academic conventions. She comes West to see her brother, Knut, and to experience life. Through Karin, Marie first learns about socialism.

Knut Larsen - Marie’s first husband is a highly educated, socialist Scandinavian man who is critical of educational institutes. Their marriage, based on equality, fails when Knut tells Marie to take his first husbandly command to sit upright in a bus and she refuses.

Sardarji Ranjit Singh - An Indian historian from the North, Singh comes from militant people and has been arrested in the struggle for freedom in India. Marie describes him as tall, thin, and ugly. He becomes Marie’s teacher and employer.

Talvar Singh - One of many Indian students who congregate in Sardarji Ranjit Singh’s home. Talvar passes to Marie a confidential list of Indian names for safekeeping. Authorities arrest him at the same time they take Marie into custody and accuse her of being a spy.

Juan Diaz - A Eurasian, Juan is half Indian and half Portuguese. A Christian by religion, he is a cynical man who openly claims that his revolutionary ideas do not extend to women. He rapes Marie, then blackmails her and her husband which, eventually, becomes the source of Marie and Anand’s breakup.

Anand Manvekar - Marie’s second husband, an Indian revolutionary whose revolutionary ideas extend to women also. He thinks that without the freedom of women, the world will not advance. However he cannot handle Marie's sex/rape incident with Juan Diaz. The marriage falls apart.

[edit] Plot Outline

Born into a farming family in Northern Missouri in the mid-1890s, Marie Rogers, along with her mother and siblings, initially follows her father as he leaves farming life to take various jobs as a railroad worker, and coal and wood hauler. The novel takes much time to characterize Marie’s experiences with education and religion during this period, as the first-person narrative allows Smedley to lyricize Marie’s inner emotional experiences. During this time, Marie very nearly marries a local cowboy, but is dissuaded by both of her parents.

As a teenager, Marie leaves home to become a schoolteacher in Tercio, New Mexico. This experience is short-lived and, after seeing her mother die of malnutrition, Marie soon leaves again to try to make money to earn an education, working as a saleswoman and journalist. Eventually, Marie is able to afford an education in Phoenix, AZ, where she meets two students, brother and sister, Karin and Knut Larsen. They introduce Marie to scholarship as a way of life. Marie soon marries Knut, and they move to San Francisco to work and study. After the trauma of an abortion, Marie rethinks her obligation to the marriage and she and Knut eventually divorce, allowing him to leave to find work and her to continue living her life on her own terms.

When America enters WWI, Marie spends time with local Socialist circles but finds herself largely unable to connect—she feels she learns little about her country and the war from them and feels she has little to do with their quick-witted thinking and conversation. She borrows money from her editor at The Graphic to send to her brother, Dan, in order to keep him from entering the service. She later learns that in spite of her efforts, Dan was shipped to France. Through a visiting Indian lecturer at her university, she meets Sardar Ranjit Singh, a man working for Indian emancipation. Alienated from her own countrymen’s misogynistic placement of her within their movement, she joins the Indian rebels with whom she feels a strong kinship.

Shortly after a confused rape/sex incident with one of the primary players in the movement, Juan Diaz, Marie is illegally arrested and cruelly interrogated in order to locate the Indian rebels. When the war ends, she is released and resumes her work with the Indians, simultaneously working rigorously as a journalist for The Call. She eventually meets the renowned Anand Manvekar with whom, in spite of her deeply-rooted reservations, she marries. Her marriage, a temporary successive merging of love and knowledge, eventually crumbles when Anand discovers her previous sexual activity with Juan Diaz and succumbs to patriarchal jealousy. Unable to cope with tensions between her love for Anand and the imposition on the Indian movement that the knowledge of her relations with Juan creates, Marie leaves to stay with her friend, Karin, in Denmark.

[edit] Major Themes

Truth and Honesty - Early in the novel, Marie highlights her tendency to embellish truth which makes the credibility of the work as based on pure autobiographical facts suspect: "My mother continued to say that I lied. But I did not know it. I was not never clear. What was truth and what was fancy could not know" (11). Throughout the novel, she questions her own statements. She tells people her father was a doctor: "Then when I suddenly recalled he was not I was swept with a strange doubt . . . . And I wondered again what was truth and what a dream" (43).

Sex/Gender/Power - Offering a distinct female literary voice in the spectrum of male proletarian novels, the novel is rife with the theme of gender bias. Marie’s troubled sexuality is a blend of gender and class oppression. She sees the hierarchy of class relation in the relationship between husbands and wives. In her view, sexual relationships are power relations as in marriages women are subservient to men. Yet, prostitution as a means to make money could be a sign of women’s agency. Besides, prostitutes are not required to have children. Marie speaks of her aunt Helen: "She was pledged to obey no man . . . . and such a life seemed preferable to marriage" (142). In a way, the novel promotes liberated sexual relations.

Nationalism/Internationalism - For Marie, earth is her "home" and wind is her "companion." At one point in the book, she refers to herself as "mother nature." Denying any bondage to the concept of country (to her, "country" is the government and the powerful people who rule it). She loves the soil, the mountains, and the deserts. Crossing the boundaries of nationality, she helps out in Indian liberation movement. She asserts: "I am working for the idea of liberty . . . .I have no country. . .my countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression--it does not matter who or where they are"(355) Seeing through Sardarji's perspective (that the struggle against capitalism was a struggle against the western world), Marie looks objectively at her own American identity.

Individual and Social Identity Development—Family, Class and Nation - "The 'respectability' of married women seemed to rest in their acceptance of servitude and inferiority [. . .] Women had to depend upon men for a living; a woman who made her own living, and would always do so, could be as independent as men" (189).

Marie's struggle to define herself in relation to her family initially comprises her childhood attempts for loving attention and recognition--she often finds herself baffled and dismayed first by the physical abuse of her mother and then by the emotional abuse of her father towards her entire family. For a time, she identifies or sympathizes with her mother, expressing her relationship with her as a "bond of misery" (114).

"Thus I deserted them a second time and strangled the emotion that tried to convince me that I should not. I would come back, I told myself, knowing I never would, but unable to face a definite fact" (156).

As a teenager and adult, Marie ambitiously pursues what education she can, while simultaneously, she feels, abandoning her brothers and mother. She desires to pull herself away from the circumstances of her family into a life of education and empowerment but always feels this guilt. Her ambivalence intensifies with the death of her mother and brother George and with her brother Dan's entrance into the service. While she occasionally visits and sends money, her guilt is never assuaged and her familial relationships remain painfully unresolved to the end of the novel.

"He was digging not just a hole in the ground, but uncovering marvelous things, all that lies in the earth. That I knew because I knew him, for I was my father's daughter" (107).

Marie's father becomes more and more distant, fading into the background (or subconscious) of the novel and of her life as an old, bitter working-class man. She periodically and ambiguously refers to herself as her "father's daughter" (15, 107).

"Love my country, Sardarji—do you mean the soil? Yes, I love that. I love the mountains of the West. And I love the deserts. But what most people mean by country is the government and the powerful men who rule it. No. I do not love them" (276).

As her narrative progresses, Marie becomes increasingly conscious of her role as an individual woman coming from a specifically American working-class background. Early on in her life, she experiences a sense of displacement among her schoolmates at a birthday party which exposes to herself and others her lower-class lack of refinement (54-9). Her identity as an educated, politically active woman does not come to her through an achieved unity with any other members of her nation, class, or gender—even after her fragmented but continual education, and after becoming a teacher herself, she never feels a sense of community with other “educated” people. This is largely due to her refusal to play the expected role and present the expected image of a woman; she does not consider the other working-class and/or educated men and women representative of her struggle for liberty.

"I often wondered what would have happened had I lived so intimately with three American men. Yet here I lived as if they were my father and brothers" (267).

She feels a true sense of community only with the members of the movement for Indian emancipation. She describes her relationship with these men as warm and caring, but without erotic associations--she views love as destructive towards women. She believes that these men, with their compassionate induction of her into their movement, are her true peers. Through this extra-national commitment, she devotes herself not to the struggle of her political class or countrymen but to those she perceives to suffer and struggle as she suffers and struggles.

"They were men who as a rule carried all their worldly possessions with them: a gun or two, a fine belt, a pair of marvelous spurs and boots [. . .] I admired and envied them" (107).

Marie does find something of a role model in the highly individualistic cowboys working for her father. Whether out of her sense of social conscience or perhaps due to the inherent masculinity of it, this lifestyle of errant independence appears to be unavailable to her.

[edit] Critical Reception

Barbara Foley asserts that Marie's desire for sexual egalitarianism ties in with her struggle to create a better world. In her view, Marie's eventual ability to feel passion for Anand is a sign of her trust for Anand in a political comrade. Once she realizes that he doesn't live up to her ideal notions of gender equality, she leaves him.

Nancy Hoffman writes: "This is a novel about the profound destructiveness of not-knowing--of ignorance caused by poverty and isolation" (407). She says that the novel defies convention not only in content but in structure as well. "The novel appears to move from mythic to novelistic to autobiographical form roughly in accordance with the movement while psychologically realistic, throwing the reader off balance" (411).

Daughter of Earth presents images of motherhood in such a negative light that Marie Rogers vows to escape marriage and all it entails. Had she not inherited her father’s “wanderlust” she might have “[…] married some working man, borne him a dozen children to wander the face of the earth, and died in my early thirties. Such was the fate of all women about me" (123). In “A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in Women’s Fiction” Judith Kegan Gardiner elaborates on the role of motherhood in Daughter of Earth. In novels from the last century, she states, “[…] heroines’ mothers represent the traditional social roles of wifehood and motherhood together with the psychological traits that conventionally accompany them. The dying mothers thus embody both the stultifying roles and the negative personal traits that the daughter want to bury" (148) ^[2]. Only as she neared death, could Marie’s mother speak of “emotions that she would never have dared say otherwise, for affection between parents and children was never shown among my people" (135). Marie avoids motherhood altogether in the novel by having an abortion.

In Daughter of Earth Smedley introduces images of the West that have significance for Marie: her father’s Indian ancestry and a love of the earth and desert are among them. Maria Lauret calls this “a consistent metaphor, not only for the gender-role transgression of frontier women bearing arms and riding around on horseback but also for Marie’s identification with the Native American past” (Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America.). When Smedley writes of the desert as she does in the following passages, nature also takes on religious connotations: “The desert, and not the Christian God, was my solace and my refuge...” (191). “The Arizona desert came closer to my spirit than has any place I have ever known” (179). “At last the road blended with the desert, the desert where nothing matters…” (182). In addition to the desert, other images in the novel come from nature.

[edit] Quotes

"The first thing I remember of life was a strange feeling of love and secrecy [. . .] My father was holding me close to his huge body in sleep" (8).

"And from that moment our roots were torn from the soil and we began a life of wandering, searching for success and happiness and riches that always lay just beyond—where we were not" (35).

"'Give me back the clothes I bought you!' he bellowed at her one day. 'Damn it, kid, you know I love you!' she begged through her tears—for now she could not go back to work even if she wished. [. . .] These two sentences sum up, in my mind, the true position of the husband and wife in the marriage relationship" (73).

“All girls married, and I did not know how I would escape, but escape I determined to. I remember that almost without words, my mother supported me in this” (125).

“But he thought a woman should always listen to a man and improve her intellect…a woman always knew less than a man; it mattered not who or what she was” (130).

“Greater love hath no woman than she who will sell her body for the sister she loves” (139).

“…when a woman marries a man and can no longer make her own living, he begins reminding her of her past” (141).

“The Helens of the world are said to be hard and without desire for children. [. . .] To me her profession seemed as honorable as that of any married woman—she made her living in the same way as they made theirs, except that she made a better living and had more rights over her body and soul. [. . .] By such things I judged decency and self respect, and such a life seemed preferable to marriage. But for me—I wanted neither that life, nor marriage. [. . .] Love, tenderness and duty belonged to women and to weaklings in general; I would have none of them!” (142).

“…for women were cruel and fearful creatures” (157).

“…hatred I expressed for women, marriage, and children [. . .] Politeness hides such a world of sins” (180).

“How I hated to be among them — we, the unbeautiful ones!” (181).

“Sex had no place in love. Sex meant violence, marriage, or prostitution, and marriage meant children, weeping nagging women and complaining men; it meant unhappiness, and all the things that I feared and dreaded and intended to avoid” (188).

“I thought I would rather be a prostitute than a married woman” (189).

"My aim in life was to study; not to follow a man around” (199).

“I would be owned and ordered by no man” (218).

“For love is an enemy of woman” (219).

“I won’t let any man judge me by my body!” (233).

“Strange it was that he, so ugly, made things so beautiful” (269).

“...the difference of race, color and creed are shadows on the face of a stream lending beauty of its own" (279).

“They told me I was a white woman! So was my mother who lay under the earth…so was Helen…so were all the Helens and mothers of my class! My country! Their country! ‘Think of your country!’ the official again cried. ‘You are not my country!’” (326).

“One man who posed as a psychoanalyst after having read a few books, came upon me in a club library one day, and standing in the door observing me for some time [. . .] ’What I think is wrong with you ,’ he continued, 'is that you are in love with your father’” (341-2).

"The Americans were just as primitive [. . .] the American, like the Indian, regarded a woman as physical being who became ruined by sex experience, whereas men became men by the same experience" (356).

"...without the freedom of Asiatic people, the European or American workers could not gain their emancipation; that one of the chief pillars of world capitalism was to be found in the subjection [subjugation??] of Asiatic people" (356).

“Bahin, some of them called me, and it warmed my heart and aroused strength and determination within me. For in it was not only love, but comradeship. I loved them with the love I had been unable to give to my brothers, to my father, to my class” (359).

“Love is the force that leaves its ineradicable trace upon the spirit” (364).

"...his revolution extended to women—without the freedom of women the world could never advance…” (369).

“I seemed to know so little tolerance—of myself or others” (380).

"Men do not use such a weapon [rape] against a man — they use it only against a woman. [. . .] He cannot hurt me — for I shall refuse to be hurt’” (404).

[edit] References

Foley, Barbara. "Women and the Left in the 1930s." American Literary History, 2:1 (Spring, 1990). 150-169.

Hoffman, Nancy. "Afterword." Daughter of Earth. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987.

Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America. Routledge, 1994.

Price, Ruth. The Lives of Agnes Smedley. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

[edit] Footnotes