Tekahionwake (E. Pauline Johnson). "A Red Girl's Reasoning" (1893) and selected poems (1895). - Although this piece appeared 14 years after the release of Ibsen's A Doll's House, Johnson's short story is MUCH more controversial, considering the race and class prejudices involved.  Nora indeed leaves her husband's Victorian home, denying the mores of her class to forge an independent life, but it is Christie who shuns European racism and bastardization prejudices and remains true to her own beliefs (and retaining independence by not returning home to her family). The title of Johnson's poem, "A Red Girl's Reasoning," is exactly that....reasoning. Reason. Supposedly a white man's trait springing from the age of "enlightenment." The ability to reason, unemotionally, through a situation. Indeed, at the end of the story, when Charlie begs for Christie (Christianity, Christ) to forgive him and return as his "relic" or possession, she scorns his desperation, as Nora Helmer scorns Torvald's pleas of Victorian morality, religion, and family. She buries the "vengeful lie" within herself...that she cannot love him because of what he has done...but even if she continues to love him, as the text alludes to the "vengeful lie in her soul" (259), reason overpowers her emotion. Charlie, throughout the text is effeminized, despite Christie's smallness and soft features. It is Charlie who cries through thick "wet, boyish lashes; Charlie with the "girlish mouth" (257); Charlie who ironically sees Christie as "simple-minded," when it is he who cannot see beyond his European ancestry of possession. But no longer is she contained within his penetrating gaze, "when once her whole world lay in their blue depths" (258). No longer is she his "little girl wife" (as Nora is no longer Torvald's "little spendthrift" and the narrator of Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" is no longer John's "blessed little goose").

Johnson makes it clear in the beginning of the story that Christie is merely an embellishment to Charlie's "relic-hunting craze . . . as a man he consummated his predilections for Indianology by loving, winning and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader, who himself had married a native woman some tewnty years ago" (252). As long as Charlie is loving and doting, Christie reciprocates; however, when he succumbs to the laws of white morality and mocks her, she returns him with a vengeance (which is so damn refreshing after reading story after story of cowering women). In 1893, of course, Charlie is not only destroyed by the publicized "illegitimacy" of his wife, but doubly screwed by the fact that she has now left him (again, as Torvald was distraught when Nora left him. Torvald never intended to force Nora from the house, but to sequester her in a room, away from the children...as Rochester did to Bertha). His greatest shame arises from the Victorian recognition that a man was no longer a man if his wife chooses to up and leave him.  Social status negated. The hypocrisy of Charlie's companions is evident in Mrs. Stuart's tradition of brushing up "her etiquette and English once a year at Ottawa" (253)--what nationality is she? French, I'm guessing...de trop. As much as the French and English have differed on religion....Catholicism vs. Protestantism...I suppose they merge somehow on the idea of legitimacy.

Like Christie, the heros/heroines of the poems are heroic, sacrificing themselves for others. "Dawendine" presents a young girl who, after the death of her brother, sacrifices her virginal self to his slayer for the peace of her village. "Wolverine," too," is a poem of sacrifice and irony. Showing two acts of kindness, "Wolverine" is shot down for merely approaching the white faction, who in their ignorance misread his intent. Too, "The Cattle Thief" reveals the perpetual hypocrisy of the white man as he guns down an old, starving man for "encroaching" on land that has been taken from him. "A Cry from an Indian Wife" reminds me of Tori Amos' "Home on the Range: Cherokee Edition," in which she sings of the Cherokee bride left behind on the Trail of Tears as her brave "was shot yesterday." Here, the woman's voice is ambivalent...torn between loving him for going into battle and begging him to stay. I am currently enrolled in the American Indian Studies graduate seminar at the Newberry Library. In our next month's meeting we will be reading more Johnson, and analyzing her texts based on literacy (what impact did the forced "alphabet" have on her and her people?) and authorship (is she writing for the collective community? Passing about her "talking stick" in order to create not a mere dialogism but a multivoiced narrative?).