When Kate Cleary moved as a twenty-year-old bride from Chicago to the newly organized town of Hubbell, Nebraska, in 1884, she was no stranger to hardship.1 She was two when her father, a lumber man from New Brunswick, died, and her mother returned to her Irish homeland with her three children to stay near relatives. Although Cleary was well-educated and raised in the genteel tradition, when the family fortune dwindled, she and her family were forced to immigrate to Philadelphia where they struggled to survive on the irregular rent from their small Irish estate and from the equally irregular income that each member of the family earned from writing for newspapers and the popular press. Three years later, when Cleary was seventeen, her mother moved the family to Chicago where poverty haunted them again. There, Cleary met her future husband, Michael, who was lured to the new West by the temptation of fast fortunes.

A lumber business in a mushrooming town proved lucrative for Michael, and for about ten years after moving to the Nebraska prairies as a newlywed, Cleary lived a secure family life, both emotionally and financially. Although distanced from the intellectual life of Chicago that she so loved, she immersed herself in raising her children, in reading the latest books, magazines, and newspapers mailed from the East, and in observing and writing about the frontier.

Unfortunately, a series of disasters struck. The Depression of the 1890s devastated her husband's business, she nearly died after the birth of her fifth child, and she lost two daughters, her mother, and her brother within a four-year time span. Her husband's lung problems worsened, and he spent months at a time away from Cleary, traveling for his health or staying with his family in Chicago, leaving his wife to cope alone in Hubbell with her large family and a new baby. In addition to all of this, she had became addicted to the morphine that her doctor had given her during her near-fatal bout with childbirth fever.

In 1899, the family returned to Chicago where Cleary continued to support the family through her writing. She tried unsuccessfully to cure her morphine addiction, a drug that was cheaply and legally obtained at the time. In October 1903, as she was moving her family to home, Cleary collapsed. She was admitted to the Elgin Insane Asylum for morphine and alcohol addiction. In February 1904, Cleary left "cured" from Elgin, but she would not rejoin her husband who had refused to sign for her release. Again, she wrote frantically to pay her expenses and those of her children until July 1905 when she died of a heart attack ten days after her husband had tried to commit her again to Elgin.

It is ironic that a woman with such a difficult and often tragic life could be considered one of the leading women humorists of Chicago. However, it is appropriate, for Cleary was nothing if not resilient. Her sense of humor and her appreciation of irony helped her survive. She described her teenage years in a strongly autobiographical short story published in 1899 entitled "Why We Didn't Hear Nilsson":

Cleary's attitude of laughing through her tears allowed her to survive the trauma of her later years. When life cast her to the bottom, she sharpened her lance, looked for a weak spot, and took aim. Satire became her weapon in her battle for survival, and Cleary's best humorous works display her keen wit and her insight into society's failings.

The business of satire, classically defined by Juvenal, was to "laugh and bite."2 A combination of wit and criticism, it typically attacked human error and folly in the social, political, economic, religious, and literary arenas as well as the human failings which propagated it.3 According to neoclassic and formalistic definitions, satire fulfilled a moral or didactic function, and humor was considered as a remedy for cultural ills. In Fables of Subversion, Steven Weisenburger, in analyzing satire's contemporary evolution in postmodern fiction, traces the history of the genre. Two of the primary elements of satire, he explains, are an object of attack and a corrective. Thus, satire is typically seen as generative rather than degenerative, constructive rather than destructive (17-20).4 For Cleary, satire provided a similar vehicle. It enabled her to confront the obstacles that impeded her and attempt to remedy society's problems as well. Satire allowed her to fight back, to take an active role in determining her destiny rather than passively bewailing her fate.

Cleary's primary object of attack was the constricting ideal of nineteenth century womanhood. Life had forced Cleary to be strong and independent, for she had helped support first her mother and brothers and then her husband and four children. The image of the New Woman emerging during the 1870s and 1880s fit Cleary perfectly. The term "New Woman" originated from a literary phrase made popular by Henry James, explains Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. "The New Women," she states, "rejecting conventional female roles and asserting their right to a career, to a public voice, to visible power, laid claim to the rights and privileges customarily accorded to bourgeois men" (176). These women wanted to lead "economically and socially autonomous lives" while maintaining the small-town "bourgeois values and genteel habits" of "honesty, morality, and service to others" (177).

Repeatedly described as "unconventional" or "bohemian," Cleary, who did not fit into the intellectual life of the small rural Nebraska town, fulfilled all aspects of the New Woman image. Although she was a devoted mother and renowned for her culinary art, she fought for her right to a public voice through her writing, and she refused to be an Angel of the House. She left her husband of nineteen years in 1903, declaring, "I shall not soon take up housekeeping in any case" and "If I had done more writing and less housework, I would be better off in every way today" (George 75). Thus, it is appropriate that a major target of Cleary's satire should be the passive, artificial, self-effacing Victorian wife.

Maureen Honey writes in Breaking the Ties That Bind that stories in popular early twentieth century magazines reflected women's growing interest in "the New Woman success tale"(10). By the beginning of the 1900s, "the woman of action had made great headway in replacing the delicate ideal of sentimental fiction and was becoming central to a new fantasy of competence in the roughest circumstances" (11). Honey detects such early feminist overtones in the popular literature of women from 1915 to 1930, considering them "pioneers" (29).

Cleary was already writing "feminist fiction" in the middle of the 1890s, especially in her satiric short stories and poems about the West. In these humorous works, she attacks the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood, criticizing the artificial ideals as well as the chauvinistic men and antediluvian women who perpetuate them. Then, she reconstructs a New Woman, a New Western Woman, to take her place, a successful woman dedicated to the concept of individual freedom and personal growth.

"An Ornament to Society" is, perhaps, Cleary's most overt satire on the Cult of True Womanhood. She directs her sharpest barbs at the artificiality of Victorian society. The story begins when Cleopatra Harrowsby's mother dies with the wish that her daughter should grow up to be "a ornament to sassiety." Jack Harrowsby is perplexed about how to fulfill his wife's wish: "I'd like awful well to please Hat about it, but--what fetches me is--what is a ornament to sassiety?" (127).

The men of the community are the most eager to define True Womanhood. Humor abounds as the rural folk try their hands at definition: an ornament to society should "take an interest in reading polite literature," "be able to speak pieces about war at the Memorial day services," "dress stylish, an' always have her hair frizzed," and do "fancy work--that's the most refined thing I know" (128). Unfortunately, Cleo is "an angular, awkward young creature" who prefers farming and working with animals. However, to please her father, she submits to her social education:

Soon, pictures in six-inch gilt frames adorn the walls, and drapes of silk and lace cover the furniture. Cleary mercilessly attacks the backwardness of the pioneers of Bubble, a name symbolic of the tenuousness of the little community's existence on the harsh prairie. Their eagerness to attain the societal norm is only surpassed by the shallowness of their definition of culture and refinement.

Cleo realizes the foolishness and pretentiousness of it all, "It's rubbish--everything I try to do. I know it--you know it, too"(131), so when Frank Stanley, the family's long-time hired man, shows her a new black stallion that her father has just purchased, she determines to break the young animal herself. She succeeds, but dislocates her shoulder while doing so. Her father, dismayed, consults Mrs. McLelland who advises:

Women, too, Cleary laments humorously, contribute to the constricting stereotype which must be upheld even despite conflicting religious convictions.

Even Mr. Harrowsby, although he loves his daughter, is so blinded by outward beauty and by public opinion that he not only forces his daughter to fulfill his wife's conception of womanhood, but he, too, perpetuates this Victorian Ideal by marrying an "ornament" of his own as the story closes, the young, beautiful sister of one of his tenants:

When confronted by an Angel in a pretty gown who cooks fancy meals and plays the piano, he forgets the years of privation, manual labor, and loneliness endured by his wife to help him achieve his success. His new bride's queenlike behavior reaps concrete results--she bags the richest widower in the county. That she "ain't never worked reel hard" makes no difference now, for he has reached the top, and all he has to do is admire the view (135).

Cleary complements this assault on Victorian artificiality with a denunciation of the submission and selflessness expected of an Angel of the House. Cleo's mother waited so long waiting for her needs to be met that personal denial became her identity, one of which society, unfortunately, approved. She spent thirty-five years of isolation, disappointment, and drudgery on the farm: "the children kep' a-comin' an' a-goin'--if 't wasn't a birth it was a death--if not a cradle that was bein' fixed it was a coffin." However, her martyrdom took a toll: "She had cryin' spells. She didn't sleep none to talk on. But the work was there to be done. She done it" (124). When her husband finally could afford the black silk dress she desired, her self-denial was so ingrained that she replied, "I've waited so long, I'll wait a bit longer. Cleo ain't growed up yet, an' girls need a lot of clothes now. I've been waitin' for that dress since I was 15. A few more years won't hurt" (126).

Hat also staunchly bore her husband's faults. At her funeral he laments, "all the nights I've come home full. An' I never could keep from swearin'. Never meant nothin' by it--it just come nat'ral. Then, when I used to go to Chicago with the hogs--but we won't talk about that." Because she fulfilled her role so well, her husband boasts, "She was a good woman . . . slews too good fur me." His wife did have two of her three life-long wishes fulfilled; her husband finally moves to town although she only lived there one month before she died. And, he buries her in the finest black, beaded silk dress he could buy. A neighbor acknowledges her husband's generosity and love: "You was never mean to her, Jack" (125). Goodness prevails, Cleary concedes, but a woman may have to wait until she is dead.

Fortunately, Cleo's mother's third wish is never fulfilled. Cleo refuses to mold herself into either the artificial ornament or self-effacing woman that Victorian society admired. She runs away from the convent and returns to the farm. Her father, distracted by the neighbor lady, forgets his goal of making Cleo an ornament to society. Left on her own, she matures naturally and gracefully, making friends among the young people, spending most of her waking hours in the open air, and leaving the drudgery of the housework to the maid paid to attend to it. A young woman, prescribes Cleary, should have the freedom to roam where she pleases; she should be self-taught from nature; she should be physically active, even those pursuits that are typically male-dominated; and her activities should be eclectic, ranging from candy pulls to "literaries." Cleary writes:

Cleary attacks the superficial education of the typical Victorian woman, with her frizzy hair and her gilt-framed paintings, and reconstructs a new program that will produce a woman radiating health and independence. In Cleopatra, Cleary creates a sympathetic character, honest and caring about her parents' wishes yet strong enough even to confront the Cult of True Womanhood. She offers her ideal of the True Western Woman to whom "Life was such a good thing--and health--and energy--and the vast sweep of the immeasurable world around and companionship with birds, and animals, and trees, and streams, and all nature's delicious, ever-varying, never satiating sweetness!" (134). To Cleary, this is the Cult of New Womanhood. Honey writes: "The New Woman relished action and strenuous physical activity. She was athletic, healthy, eager to take on challenges in the non-domestic world. By the 1910s, the woman of action had made great headway in replacing the delicate ideal of sentimental fiction and was becoming central to a new fantasy of competency in the roughest circumstances" (10-11).

Cleary concludes her narrative by reconstructing a New Marriage. An androgynous woman arises from her fiction, one who can plow fields, break wild stallions to ride, and nurse sick livestock as well as enjoy the companionship of friends at a taffy pull or the intellectual stimulation of country "literaries." Such a woman, freed from societal taboos and expectations, would make the ideal wife. Although the blossoming Cleo could marry the town doctor or hardware man, she chooses the family's hired man, "an erect, muscular, young fellow, bold as a lion when 'rounding up' or stock lading, but of lamblike meekness of demeanor in the presence of femininity" (129). Both are strong and healthy examples of young adulthood. Their relationship is based on a long-standing friendship and shared values: the belief in hard work and an abiding love of nature. As a wedding present, Cleo's father gives the young couple the farm, half of his hogs, and one hundred young steers. Cleo and Frank, we assume, will be working side by side and sharing the responsibilities as well as the rewards of life. Cleo's place will not be in the house, especially one in town, and she will not wish for a black silk dress or that her daughter become an ornament to society. Cleo's feet are firmly planted on Western soil.

Ernest Jackson Hall, in his study, The Satirical Elements of the American Novel, credits satire for its "value in interpreting and appraising many varied and important phases of our social history" (81). Kate Cleary's western satires give us first-hand interpretations of life in the new West. In their westward movement, pioneers frequently transported cultural baggage that hindered social growth, such as the constricting Victorian ideals of womanhood. However, the democratic spirit also accompanied them and found room to expand on the vast plains. Cleary, an independent and resourceful woman in her own right, encouraged that free spirit in her writings by humorously pointing out the follies of mankind and constructing alternatives. Her humor and her ability to lighten the burdens of others through her writing, not only helped her endure her own hardships, but perhaps prodded society into re-examining its unnatural expectations for women. (3256 words)

1 Biographical information on Cleary is found in more detail in Susanne K. George's Kate M. Cleary: A Literary Biography with Selected Works (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Quotations from "An Ornament to Society," orginally published in the Chicago Tribune, 9 April 1899, are taken from this edition.

2 Hall 5.

3 Hall 6.

4 Weisenburger's study, however, endeavors to show that postmodern fiction is degenerative satire rather than generative; it forces us to "reconsider the role played by its grotesques" (24).