Me

When the first installment of the memoir, Me: A Book of Remembrance, appeared in the April 1915 edition of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, readers were drawn into the rather scandalous story of a young ingénue named Nora as she departs from the safety of her Canadian home for the wide, wide world beyond. After an adventure in the West Indies, Nora arrives in the United States, where there is danger to virtue and reputation everywhere. Found in the YWCA and on the streets of big American cities: working girls speaking common slang, a dearth of respectable jobs, and smarmy men with lurid propositions. What will become of the innocent Canadian lass? In her introduction to the book, Jean Webster, grandniece of Mark Twain and well-known author of her own accord, echoed the opening of Sister Carrie when she called Me “an illuminative picture of what may befall a working-girl who, at the age of seventeen, gaily ventures forth to conquer life with ten dollars in her pocket” (Webster 801). Her synopsis suggests that the author was far less generous in her account of a young woman’s options than was Theodore Dreiser. At least he imagined options when he wrote, “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse” (Dreiser 1). Still, the story of a maiden’s fall in the big, bad city (or cities) was not new, but a Victorian staple; into the Progressive Era, it appeared not only in the tales of rural American girls facing urban life, but also as a national/moral boundary crossing in Canadian/American writing (such as Charles G. D. Roberts’s 1896 story “Stony Lonesome: A Story of the Provinces”; Harvey J. O’Higgins’s 1906 novel, Don-A-Dreams; Gilbert Parker’s 1909 novel Northern Lights).