Zona Gale / Seven Quotes

SEVEN  QUOTES

by Zona Gale

“When you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better.”

— Zona Gale

“The unexpressed is always of greater value than the expressed.”

— Zona Gale

“Loving, like prayer, is a power as well as a process. It’s curative. It is creative.”

— Zona Gale

“I tell you of all history the most beautiful product is the family tie.”

— Zona Gale

“I don’t know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.”

— Zona Gale

“Always he had wanted to tell somebody about his life, but when he had tried, his confidante had looked at him.”

— Zona Gale

“Moments of mystery are rare enough, in all conscience; and when they do arrive all the world misses them by trying to understand them. Which is manifestly ungrateful and stupid.”

— Zona Gale

Zona Gale / White Bread

 

White Bread

by Zona Gale

BIOGRAPHY

EVERY one in the room had promised something. Mis' Tyrus Burns offered her receipt for filled cookies. "My filled cookie receipt," she said, "is something that very, very few have ever got out of me. I give it to Mis' Bradford—when she moved away. I've give it to one or two of my kin—by word of mouth and not wrote down. And Carol Beck had it from me when she was married—wrote out on note-paper, formal—but understood to be a personal receipt and not general at all. This 'll be the first time I've ever give in to make it public, and nothing on earth but the church carpet would make me now."

Zona Gale / Peter

 

PETER

by Zona Gale

BIOGRAPHY

Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there. It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.

Zona Gale / Bill

BILL

By Zona Gale

BIOGRAPHY

 Bill was thirty when his wife died, and little Minna was four. Bill’s carpenter shop was in the yard of his house, so he thought that he could keep his home for Minna and himself. All day while he worked at his bench, she played in the yard, and when he was obliged to be absent for a few hours, the woman next door looked after her. Bill could cook a little, coffee and bacon and fried potatoes and flapjacks, and he found bananas and sardines and crackers useful. When the woman next door said it was not the diet for four-year-olds, he asked her to teach him to cook oatmeal and vegetables, and though he was always burned the dishes in which he cooked these things, he cooked them every day. He swept, all but corners, and he dusted, dabbing at every object; and he complained that after he had cleaned the windows he could not see as well as he could before. He washed and patched Minna’s little garments and mended her doll. He found a kitten for her so that she wouldn’t be lonely. At night he heard her say her prayer, kneeling in the middle of the floor with her hands folded, and speaking like lightning. If she forgot the prayer, he either woke her up, or else he made her say it the first thing in the morning. He himself used to pray: “Lord, make me do right by her if you see me doing wrong.” On Sundays, he took her to church and listening with his head on one side, trying to understand, and giving Minna peppermints when she rustled. He stopped work for a day and took her to the Sunday-school picnic. “Her mother would of,” he explained. When Minna was old enough to go to kindergarten, Bill used to take her morning or afternoon, and he would call for her. Once he dressed himself in his best clothes and went to visit the school. “I think her mother would of,” he told the teacher, diffidently. But he could make little of the colored paper and the designs and the games, and he did not go again. “There’s something I can’t be any help to her with,” he thought.

Minna was six when Bill fell ill. On a May afternoon, he went to a doctor. When he came home, he sat in his shop for a long time and did nothing. The sun was beaming through the window in bright squares. He was not going to get well. It might be that he had six months. … He could hear Minna singing to her doll.

When she came to kiss him that night, he made an excuse, for he must never kiss her now. He held her arm’s length, looked in her eyes, said: Minna’s a big girl now. She doesn’t want Papa to kiss her.” But her lip curled and she turned away sorrowful, so the next day Bill went to another doctor to make sure. The other doctor made him sure.

He tried to think what to do. He had a sister in Nebraska, but she was a tired woman. His wife had a brother in the city, but he was a man of many words. And little Minna… there were things known to her which he himself did not know—matters of fairies and the words of songs. He wished that he could hear of somebody who would understand her. And he had only six months…

Then the woman next door told him bluntly that he ought not to have the child there, and him coughing as he was; and he knew that his decision was already upon him.

One whole night he thought. Then he advertised in a city paper:

A man with a few months more to live would like nice people to adopt his little girl, six, blue eyes, curls. References required.

They came in limousine, as he had hoped that they would come. Their clothes were as he had hoped. They had with them a little girl who cried: “Is this my little sister?” On which the woman in the smart frock said sharply:

“Now then, you do as mama tells you and keep out of this or we’ll leave you here and take this darling little girl with us.”

So Bill looked at this woman and said steadily that he had now other plans for his little girl. He watched the great blue car roll away. “For the land sake!” said the woman next door when she heard. “You done her out of fortune. You hadn’t the right—a man in your health.” And then the other cars came, and he let them go, this woman told her husband that Bill ought to be reported to the authorities.

The man and woman who walked into Bill’s shop one morning were still mourning their own little girl. The woman was not sad—only sorrowful, and the man, who was tender of her, was a carpenter. In blooming of his hope and his dread, Bill said to them: “You’re the ones.” When they asked: “How long before we can have her?” Bill said: “One day more.”

That day he spent in the shop. It was summer and Minna was playing in the yard. He could hear the words of her songs. He cooked their supper and while she ate, he watched. When he had tucked her in her bed, he stood in the dark hearing her breathing. “I’m a little girl tonight—kiss me,” she had said, but he shook his head. “A big girl, a big girl,” he told her.

When they came for the next morning, he had her ready, washed and mended, and he had mended her doll. “Minna’s never been for a visit!” he told her buoyantly. And when she ran toward him, “A big girl, a big girl,” he reminded her.

He stood and watched the man and woman walking down the street with Minna between them. They had brought her a little blue parasol in case the parting should be hard. This parasol Minna held bobbing above her head, and she was so absorbed in looking up at the blue silk that she did not remember to turn and wave her hand.

Resuscitating Zona Gale

Zona Gale / Bill
Zona Gale / Peter
Zona Gale / White Bread

Resuscitating Zona Gale

Resuscitating Zona Gale

BIOGRAPHY

Zona Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1874 and died in Chicago in 1938. Since then, we haven’t heard much about this writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Miss Lulu Bett in 1921.

Perhaps her stories are a little too sentimental. Friendship Village (1908), Friendship Village Love Stories (1909), Neighborhood Stories (1914), and other collections of short fiction really are penetrating in their perception and pictures of small-town life, and some newspaper critics referred to Friendship Village as a utopia. These same critics also declared Gale “one of the foremost writers of our time” alongside the literati of the starkest realism including Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Horatio Alger, Sinclair Lewis, and Edith Wharton.

To be sure, Gale didn’t dwell on the unpleasant side of human nature. One of my favorite characters in Friendship Village is the chatty spinster Calliope Marsh, ungrammatically pouring forth the milk of human kindness toward her neighbors.

Then social causes increasingly crept into her fiction, and she changed her views about idyllic village life, possibly stemming from her political views. As a political activist and supporter of the La Follette family, Gale joined the National Women’s Party, lobbied for the Wisconsin Equal Rights Law, and became a member of the executive committee of the Lucy Stone League. In 1923, she was appointed to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, where she served until her death from pneumonia.

This new strain of writing includes her greatest successes, Miss Lulu Bett (1920) and Faint Perfume (1923), both satirical depictions of oppressive domesticity and female independence. It also produced the unpublished short story “The Reception Surprise,” which argues for equal rights for African Americans.

I’m a fan of Miss Lulu, who claims power and her rightful position in her home and in society at large. She understands that it’s her work that keeps the household running and that her family values her only as a servant. However, through her brief encounter with Ninian, Lulu begins to see that she possesses powers of her own, and she’s able to express herself and direct her own future rather than succumb to the will of those around her.

After she wrote this novel and adapted it for the stage, there was no returning to Friendship Village. Faint Perfume, another best-selling novel, indicts medical treatments designed to heal intellectual, overly stimulated women, as does Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s canonical “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Leda, an unmarried New York author stricken with neuritis, submits to her physician’s order to cease writing for one year and recover in her father’s house in the Midwest. Unlike Gilman, who liberates her heroine, Gale allows her protagonist to silently lose her mind, art, and identity.

Why should we invite Gale into our Wisconsin classrooms? All of these texts are open access and free at websites such as Hathi Trust Digital Library and Project Gutenberg, and they provide a great deal of insight into the rural communities where many of us teach. Is Friendship Village a century ago similar to contemporary Ingram in Rusk County, Lime Ridge in Sauk County, or another of the 400 villages around the state? Can you find current examples of Leda and Lulu in a state that only this month voted along party lines to advance the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution? How do small-town settings serve as a means of critiquing social institutions and ideas beyond the confines of the small town? In American fiction, the small town often serves as a crucible for democracy, and just as often doesn’t. Experiment with these stories and send your lesson plans and students’ reactions to an upcoming issue of Wisconsin English Journal.

THE WISCONSIN ENGLISH JOURNAL

Resuscitating Zona Gale

Zona Gale / Bill
Zona Gale / Peter
Zona Gale / White Bread