A Sympathetic Misunderstanding? Mary Hallock Foote's Mining West

Foote strips needlework of the glamour of its association with myth and the exotic preindustrial world of the Lady of Shalott. Hence, we might argue, the apparent lack of interest in representing Hester's scarlet letter, embroidered by the exiled, though sought after, artist. Not only is isolated feminine artistry ironically treated by Foote, but the complex association made by Hawthorne between exile and creativity is not pursued either. Foote seems to eschew the association long made by female artists between their exclusion from the public stage and exile. The parallels between what Foote referred to as her "exile" in the West and her development as a writer brought her close to the situation that [Nathaniel Hawthorne] describes Hester Prynne experiencing as an artist: ejection from the community and yet valued for her skilled artistry. The exigencies of working for an absent yet controlling audience are dealt with fleetingly in her fiction. One thinks of Arnold's nightly scribbling, shut up in his office, in "In Exile" (1881), or of Hilgard, in The Led-Horse Claim (1888), apparently condemned to fruitless attempts to communicate with indifferent investors.(30) But these vignettes focus primarily on alienation from those in power rather than on concerns about the advantages of "exile" in creative terms. We might expect Foote to use the illustrations for The Scarlet Letter -- a text that has much to say about escape into "wilderness" and the female artist in exile -- to concentrate on the creative work [Hester] performs in her isolated home. She does not. On the contrary, Foote's images do not even depict Hester's state of ostracism, and they virtually erase the fantastical and defiant creativity of the scarlet letter. Foote's training and early illustration, then, was not merely ambitious; it seems to have left her with a sense of the importance of working within an artistic mainstream. If her background in Pre-Raphaelite creative practices might have shaped such assumptions, Pre-Raphaelitism had other meanings with regard to the artist's role and position. For their American admirers, the Pre-Raphaelites' work could be imagined as a break with convention that demanded the move into "new territory" at every level. Perhaps Foote's training and her aesthetic outlook inspired her to claim "unoccupied" artistic territory: the representation of the mining industry in fiction. As [Wallace Stegner] points out, it was unusual for writers -- male or female -- to