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"Though it Broke My Heart to Cut Some Bits I Fancied": Ella Deloria's Original Design for Waterlily
Any given narrative arises out of a vast constellation of stories, formal and informal, personal or "high art," and it is this all-encompassing matrix that provides a given work its apparently "self-contained" meaning. In short, every story is an excerpt.
Paula Gunn Allen, Voice
It is sometime in the mid-1940s.1 A woman in her late fifties is toiling on three manuscripts at once: an ethnography, a combination of apologia and advocacy for her people in and after wartime, and a novel. The latter she describes to Margaret Mead as "about a girl who lived a century ago, in a remote camp-circle of the Teton Dakotas":
Only my characters are imaginary; the things that happen are what the many old women informants have told me as having been their own or their mothers' or other relatives' experiences. I can claim as original only the method of fitting these events and ceremonies into the tale. . . . [I]t reads convincingly to any who understand Dakota life. . . . And it is purely the woman's point of view, her problems, aspirations, ideals, etc.2
She works at the manuscripts when she can find time, for her income is the precarious one of a freelance, and she often, indeed usually, does not know when, or from whom, her next check is coming. She is far from enjoying Virginia Woolf's minimum standards for a woman writer to produce quality work: a room of her own and a modest independent income. Any untoward circumstance-the need to nurse her dying father, to pay for an operation for her sister, to fund her brother's and other relatives' education, to survive a bank or crop failure, flood, or cyclone, any ill health of her own necessitating hospitalization for respiratory or kidney disease and blood transfusions, even dropping an iron on her foot or breaking her glasses-can bankrupt her temporarily.
She adds to the manuscripts in small apartments in New York City or New Jersey, in her brother's rectory or rented space in South Dakota or Iowa, in hotel rooms, friends' houses. Sometimes her base is an ancient or rented car. "If I could live in a...