What's in a name, Spoon River?

Even a quick perusal of the titles of the 243 epitaphs of ‘Spoon River Anthology’ reveals a staggering male bias. Just from the titles alone, without reading the underlying poems, there are a whopping 187 poems readily identifiable as ‘male’. This, in contrast to just 54 poems recognisably ‘female’ and, of these, ten of the women have no given name, being referred to only in relation to their marital status. Even in death, it seems, the womenfolk lacked a voice.

If we take Masters at his word when he says he would “draw the macrocosm by portraying the microcosm”, we can read this dearth of female voices as reflective of the time and place rather than a sign of misogyny on the poet’s part. That there are so many women who lack a given name of their own – Mrs. Benjamin Pantier, Mrs. Charles Bliss and Mrs. George Reece among others – is not a sign that Edgar Lee Masters had a policy of ‘disappearing’ women from the register of life so much as a reflection of the reality of the Constitution, at the time of the Anthology’s publication, not yet enshrining the right of women to an equal say in the governing of the nation’s affairs.

Outside of Spoon River, Edgar Lee Masters has been criticised for too freely expressing his personal political views in his writing. How he was able to produce the Anthology without his usual weaknesses as a writer spoiling his efforts is a mystery for the biographically curious. It may be, of course, that the Anthology contains those views every bit as much as his other writings. Whatever muse was guiding his pen while writing ‘Spoon River Anthology’ allowed him a degree of control lacking elsewhere in his work.

The whole point of the epitaphs is to give voice to thoughts, feelings and accusations that couldn’t be expressed in life. It cannot be said, then, that the women who do appear in the Anthology lack a voice. That there are so few female voices, in relation to the number of males, must, therefore, be telling. Could it be, in this Anthology, the writing of which was to be the only time Fortune smiled upon Masters as a writer, he was able to make a political point simply by his selection of characters?

Certainly, he is not silent on the act of writing poetry, with several characters named after famous poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey Burke and J. Milton Miles – as well as two of the male characters bearing the title ‘Poet’. Interestingly, Minerva Jones also claims to be a poet, or poetess, yet isn’t acknowledged as such in her title. Yet again, the female voice is not quite as loud as the male. Only if one is aware that the Roman Goddess, Minerva, was, among other things, the goddess of poetry will one see the significance of her name.

There remains the difference, though, between the male openness and the female hiddenness. Just by reading the list of titles, one can see that Theodore and Petit are poets. Minerva is not so visible. Though this is 1915 and not the 1800s, Minerva’s place is that “world of privacy, family, and morality”, described by one Dr. Graham Warder, a “separate sphere” to the man’s world, which is “the public world -– economic striving, political maneuvering, and social competition”. The two male poets are publicly acknowledged as such, whereas we must step inside the poem itself – and her name - to discover Minerva’s calling.

Maybe it is not possible to say whether Masters is merely observing the macrocosm and reflecting it in his microcosm, as he claims but, certainly, he is at pains to stress his representing ordinary people from an ordinary town in America. For instance, in 1915, when ‘Spoon River Anthology’ was published, the most common male name in the USA was ‘John’. Sure enough, the male name which appears most often in the titles for the epitaphs is ‘John’. Is it purely coincidental that the second most common name in the USA, in 1915, and in Masters’ list of titles is ‘William’? Whether it is or not, Masters was clearly socially aware enough to accurately reflect precisely what he set out to show.

Nicknames are public things, more likely given to us by friends and colleagues than by family members. It should come as no surprise, then, that of the nine characters in the list of titles who bear a nickname, eight of them are male. The one female, “Russian Sonia”, is a German ‘dancer’ who lived with Patrick Hummer in Spoon River unmarried. In other words, Sonia is not of genteel American stock but, rather, a woman who came from the outside into the community under her own terms, oblivious to the concerns of the society in which she was brought to live.

It is to be expected that all the characters with titles – all the Docs, Judges, and Captains – are male. In this world in which the male is socially and culturally dominant, it would be extremely unlikely that a woman would hold an elevated position in the public arena. What is a little more surprising, however, is that all the characters referred to by their occupations are also male. Apart from the two poets and ‘Penniwit, the Artist’, it might be said that all the professions listed are male jobs – fisherman, druggist, cooper, and dentist, among others.

We could speculate about the absence of females listed by their occupation – no school teachers, or domestic workers, or store keepers, for instance. But, probably, would have to conclude, as we did with ‘Minerva Jones’, that only by going inside, into the privacy of the poems themselves, so to speak, will we discover that, in fact, there are women in Spoon River who work for a living – ‘Emily Sparks’ being a prime example as she informs us in passing that she was a school teacher.

Masters claims to have drawn “the macrocosm by portraying the microcosm” and we should take him at his word. Reading the titles of the epitaphs reveals a strikingly accurate portrait of early twentieth-century America, with its separation of the sexes into “separate spheres”. The female sphere of the privacy of the interior is clearly reflected in not just the disparity between the numbers of males and females but, also, in how the sexes are to be seen – males publicly visible as workers and successful professionals; females recognised only as wives and widows, otherwise to be seen but not heard.