Kelley, Emma Dunham (?–?), novelist. Little is known about the life of Emma Dunham Kelley. She wrote two novels, Megda (1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1895). Kelley used the pseudonym “Forget-Me-Not” for her first novel, publishing the second under the name Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, thus indicating marriage. It is probable that Kelley lived in New England, where she may have been a school-teacher or attended school: both novels were published and set in New England, and in the preface to Four Girls the author acknowledges that much of the text is based on actual people, places, and events. The dedications to Kelley's novels express a sense of debt to a widowed mother who struggled to provide for her daughter and to an aunt whom she calls a “second mother.”
Both of Kelley's texts are didactic novels in the tradition of the female Christian bildungsroman, a genre that was sufficiently popular in the 1890s for Megda to warrant a second printing. In their rejection of social protest and their avoidance of the subject of race, Kelley's novels are exceptional among the work of African American women publishing in the 1890s. Rather, they are typical of writing by white women in the “girl's fiction” subgenre of the sentimental novel, a category notable for its emphasis on socializing young women into the dominant social order. Yet while Kelley's texts urge acceptance of the status quo and earthly suffering as God's will, their emphasis on personal salvation may have been based in the widespread view that moral reformation of individuals was the necessary precondition for progressive social change.
Each of Kelley's novels features a group of girls whom readers follow from a carefree late adolescence through a process of Christian conversion and concomitant acceptance of the responsibilities of adult womanhood, as defined by late-nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism. Each text features a particularly spirited, ambitious, and talented heroine who initially resists the Christian path but who in the end claims Jesus as her savior and finds her reward in a traditional marriage and the inner peace that immediately follows upon her conversion.
There is disagreement regarding the precise racial identification of Kelley's characters. The confusionis compounded by the iconography of Megda, in which fair skin is almost invariably correlated with virtue, the exception being one very poor, devout young woman described as having skin significantly darker than that of her wealthier peers. Even here, coloring may be an indicator of class status rather than racial difference. The uncertainty regarding the race of Kelley's characters is indicative of the subtle tension her novels reveal on matters of race and gender. Though atypical among African American treatments of these topics, Kelley's texts display numerous marks of strain that suggest the uncomfortable position occupied by middle-class African American women of the period. Their female-centered Christian ethos, while rejecting social protest, anticipates the feminist spirituality found in much late-twentieth-century African American women's writing.
Bibliography
- Molly Hite, introduction to Megda, 1988.
- Deborah McDowell, introduction to Four Girls at Cottage City, 1989
Meryl F. Schwartz
