“Angels in the Commonplace”
“The fiction of the future will realize angels in the commonplace. It will clarify the beauty of much that we are accustomed to pass by.”
—Zona Gale, Portage, Wisconsin and Other Essays (1928)1
“IS THERE A SCHOOL OF WISCONSIN WRITERS?” WROTE Zona Gale. It was 1895, the state’s entry into the Union was not yet half a century old, and Gale was a distinguished but unknown student of English literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The youthful hubris of her undergraduate thesis question is palpable—even more so given the answer implied in the paper’s title: “The So-called School of Wisconsin Authors.” Gale’s critical review profiles fifteen writers bearing names now largely forgotten, including those of novelist Hamlin Garland, humor writer William Nye, poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and historian Charles King. Her assessment was decidedly negative: “They have not won their material so much from men as from books. … Lack of originality does not constitute a school and there is this lack among Wisconsin writers; a lack of the lyric quality, so to speak, the revelation of their personalities in their work.”2
Surely this exuberance must have raised a few eyebrows among her advisors. Yet it is unlikely any foresaw that Gale’s own eventual literary achievement would eclipse Wisconsin-bred literature entirely. As a novelist and playwright, Gale took up the revelation not of her personality but of small-town Wisconsin life as her primary mission. Over the next two and a half decades Gale would attain significant celebrity and critical praise for her fiction, which evolved from lighthearted romance to biting social realism, culminating in a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921 for her stage adaptation of her novella Miss Lulu Bett. In the popular imagination, she was another venerated prophet of Main Street, affiliated with contemporary writers Edith Wharton and Sinclair Lewis; but much like that of her Wisconsin predecessors, that “So-called School,” her work has slowly receded to the margins of American literature.
Gale’s work was almost invariably set in her hometown of Portage, a small city in Columbus County on the banks of the Wisconsin River and shadowed in the evening sunset by the western Baraboo Bluffs. A unique sense of place, of civilization in tune with the natural world—“the long Caledonia hills, the four rhythmic spans of the bridge, the nearer river, the island where the first birds build”—informs the true subject of her fiction: the possibility of empathy within the quaint, socially oppressive Middle West society of the early twentieth century.3 Her work documents every dimension of small-town life in this era, from the power of community and the pain of alienation, to the possibility of the frontier and the drudgery of daily routine, to romance and isolation, to spiritual fulfillment and existential dread. Such was the depth and scope of this panorama that her friend and occasional rival Willa Cather would write in a letter to Gale, “I am haunted by Portage.”4
Today, Portage is a typical small Midwestern community, with a charming downtown center surrounded by a sprawl of maple-hemmed suburban streets. The Georgian Revival–style home where Zona Gale lived and wrote is now the Museum at the Portage, a
