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The following is excerpted from the introduction to the new edition of Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model by Winnifred Eaton.
In April 1916, Hearst’s magazine began serializing the novel Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model by “the Author of ‘Me.’” For eight months, readers followed the tale of Marion Ascough, a young girl growing up in late nineteenth-century Quebec in a large family that, for reasons only vaguely explained, lives outside both French and English society. The narrative tracks Marion’s capricious adventures with men of different backgrounds, and her forays into the world of the stage and onto the pedestal. Early in the novel she meets Reggie, an upper-class Englishman, whom she hopes to marry. The marriage, however, is interminably delayed for reasons that, like her exclusion from French and English society, are not explicit. Ultimately, Marion decides to leave home and try her luck in the United States. At first, she seems to be even less successful there: she is professionally and personally degraded by having to support herself as an artist’s model rather than an artist, and she has to struggle to survive and keep her dignity intact in a bohemian corner of cosmopolitan New York. The conclusion of the novel, however, is satisfying, particularly for a readership that allowed itself to indulge in salacious stories as long as they ended with “a wicked life repented of,” as Daniel Defoe wrote of Moll Flanders, who also wrapped up her tale in the safe blanket of legal matrimony. Marion has neither wedded the man of her youthful dreams, nor has she become a great artist, but on the final page of the book, she is given one version of a generic fantasy ending: a sanctified marriage to the tall, blond, handsome man who loves her. This ending enabled readers to forgive Marion’s former lapses in judgment and decorum and to abandon the search for the secret of her identity—a secret that the advertised authors, “Herself and the Author of ‘Me,’” intimated existed by virtue of their own anonymity, as well as the elusive discussion of Marion’s “conspicuous and freaky” family and her mother’s “foreign” nationality in the opening pages (Marion 2, 1).
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Like its predecessor, Marion is an interesting story of immigration, racial secrecy, and indiscreet romances. I argue, however, that, unlike Me, Marion offers itself to readers not merely as a story to be read but also as an experience that requires participation. If we understand modeling to be a metaphor for being racially different or ambiguous, we can see that by giving us Marion, who is scrutinized, examined, deconstructed, fragmented, and characterized in different ways for different purposes, Eaton creates a character who embodies the muddledness of categorization. Marion invites the questions and looks that ask, “Who are you?” “What are you?” and “Where do you come from?”; the costumes she is made to wear and painterly manipulations that alter her in diverse ways are the artists’ attempts to answer these questions. Yet artists in the novel who paint Marion are but stand-ins for the audience of this book. They—and, by extension, we—are spectators, investigators, classifiers who analyze the body/text and the accompanying features/illustrations for clues about Marion’s identity. And we, the readers, like the artists, are ultimately responsible for trying to force the heroine into a racial or ethnic category— one that Eaton does not provide.
To learn more about Marion, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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