Pauleena MacDougall’s carefully researched biography reveals its subject as first of all a woman of fierce, imperious will. The eldest daughter of Maine fur trader and amateur ornithologist Manly Hardy (a name no fiction writer would dare), Fannie Hardy (1865-1946) grew up in her father’s big shoes, idealized the bustling commercial world he lived in, and coped with her life’s tragedies at least in part by devoting her research and writing to celebrating its glories. The tragedies, after the boisterous Eden of her girlhood, hit early and hard—married at twenty-eight, she was by thirty-five a widow who had already also lost one of her two young children. She met this desolation implacably, assuring college classmates she had “yielded nothing to Death that I shall not demand again—and get” (35). Identifying herself as a “daughter of the Maine woods” (xiii), she took upon herself the task of representing to outsider readers both the woods themselves and the people who earned their livelihood in them.
She started with birds. Manly Hardy, in addition to supplying furs to international markets and wild game to Boston restaurants, also “amassed one of the finest bird collections in North America” (26) and was a frequent contributor to natural history magazines. He’d trained daughter Fannie in taxidermy at twelve, and her own first essays appeared in Forest and Stream in 1899. MacDougall’s second chapter, “Eckstorm as Naturalist,” explores her work in this arena. With her third chapter, “Eckstorm as Ethnographer of Local Woodsmen,” Macdougall comes to the core of Eckstorm’s work, discussing her first book, The Penobscot Man (1904), and the later David Libbey: Penobscot Woodsman and River-Driver (1907). This is a tonal challenge. On the one hand, MacDougall rightly praises the “detailed journals” (46) and especially the photographs Eckstorm made of the river drivers at work. On the other hand, her “belief in New England superiority” (51) leads her to present her subjects in “heroic terms” (49). Sober ethnography often takes a back seat to booster (and racist) cant, as when her David Libbey volume, published in a “True American Types” series, offers the woodsman as “an American yeoman of the purest stock.” The following chapter is a similarly mixed review of Eckstorm’s studies of local ballad traditions. On the positive side, the collections of Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smyth, published in 1927 as Minstrelsy of Maine: Folk-Songs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast, were pioneering efforts, revealing a “living tradition of ballad making in Maine” (63). But here, too, a narrow regional chauvinism sometimes got in the way: “She wished to prove that New England had the richest treasure of ballads… and to show that more ballads could be found in Maine than elsewhere in the United States” (65). MacDougall’s final chapters deal with Eckstorm’s studies of Maine’s Native American place names and with her final book, Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans (1945), accomplished with the help of her Penobscot informant, Clara Neptune.
The weak points of MacDougall’s study are mostly peripheral. Her attempts to locate Eckstorm in various larger contexts, as for example in debates over the value of “local” or indigenous knowledge systems, are often either glibly superficial or simply in error, and at the sentence level her writing can at times be numbingly repetitive. A striking instance of the former would be the laughable discussion of the emergence of an American literature “separate from English literature” as beginning “roughly in 1890” (50). This would come as a great surprise to the many “local color” writers who flourished half a century earlier, as well as to the barbaric yawper himself, whose Leaves of Grass was well into its fourth decade in print by 1890. So late a date would ship Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, Uncle Tom, and Tom Sawyer back across the Atlantic. One instance of the latter flaw would be the reports of Eckstorm’s undergraduate career, where readers learn twice that she “graduated from Smith College” (xvii, 2) and three times that this feat was accomplished in 1888 (xvii, 9, 14).
Fluency of style, however, is a secondary virtue in a work of scholarship, and MacDougall’s solid research gives her study an enduring value. She seems helpfully right on, too, in observing that Eckstorm saw herself as tasked with a mission she understood as noble. She hoped through her books to both elevate in their own eyes a people she saw as “hers” and free them at the same time from negative stereotypes in the eyes of others. As she put it, speaking of Maine’s balladry, she hoped to “reveal them to themselves through the interpretation of their own verses” (68). Eckstorm’s Penobscot Man thus attempts for Maine something on the scale of what Elias Lönnrot achieved for Finland, or (more appositely) what George Korson sought for Pennsylvania miners, Jean Thomas for Kentucky mountaineers, and Vance Randolph for Ozarkers. If such ambitious goals at times resulted in a bumptious regionalism and overheated prose at huge remove from current conceptions of the proper work of scholars, it is nevertheless helpful to at least approach the efforts of the discipline’s foundational figures in the light cast by their own purposes. Pauleena MacDougall’s work has skillfully accomplished this empathetic move, even as she has not hesitated to judge those efforts by contemporary standards.
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[Review length: 884 words • Review posted on April 9, 2014]