Kenneth Hayes Miller

Although Kenneth Hayes Miller was the most conservative in social and political outlook of the four artists I discuss, he spent his childhood in an environment that challenged many of the social and sexual underpinnings of Victorian America. Miller was born in 1876 to Annie Elizabeth Kelly and George Miller, who lived in the Oneida community, one of the more successful and long-lived of the nineteenth-century utopian experiments (1848-1879). Within the settlement, founded by John Humphrey Noyes (Miller's granduncle by marriage),^[9] Oneidans, like the Shakers and the Mormons, combined a religious quest for spiritual perfection with a desire to alter monogamy and the nuclear family.^[10] They did so, as Louis Kern has explained, through communal sexuality, complex marriage, and a eugenic experiment called stirpiculture. To separate the joyous amative component from the unwanted propagative result of sexual intercourse, Oneidan males, counseled by their leader Noyes, developed a system of male continence by which the male completely withheld ejaculation, permitting his female partner orgasm without fear of conception. This system of coitus reservatus was a version of the nineteenth-century spermatic economy doctrine, which held that the loss of seminal fluid would debil-

itate male vitality, in its most extreme form causing complete mental and physical deterioration. Whereas the usual solution was abstinence, the system of male continence permitted frequent sexual encounters in a community where free love (understood not as promiscuity but as a belief that love rather than marriage should determine sexual relations) was both central and sacred. It also allowed the male to develop and subsequently practice an extreme form of sexual self-control that demonstrated male perfection.^[11]

Behind the system of complex marriage lay the assumption that the most unselfish love was one that subordinated individual desire and romantic feeling to the communal good. Hence, all men and women in the community were married to one another. Men could request sex from any woman in the settlement, and although a woman could refuse, she was not permitted to initiate any such encounter. Sexual pairings came under community surveillance, which took the form of regular mutual-criticism sessions. In 1867, as the ranks of single or widowed women grew and as the system of male continence proved an effective method of birth control, Oneidans instituted the eugenic experiment known as stirpiculture. Community leaders (principally Noyes himself) either selected or approved couples for childbearing.^[12] The healthiest women mated with men who best exemplified perfectionist ideals to produce offspring who would improve the race or, at a more mundane level, fill a need within the community. It is said, for example, that Miller's parents were designated to produce a badly needed carpenter.^[13]

George Miller and Annie Kelly, like many second-generation Oneidans, grew dissatisfied with complex marriage; couples designated for reproduction often forged romantic attachments. Community efforts to rechannel these bonds and to negate maternal connections by placing children in communal nurseries met with increasing resistance both inside and outside the community. In 1879 these pressures sent Noyes into exile near Niagara Falls; community members who moved to the Oneida suburb of Kenwood restored monogamous marriage among themselves. Miller's parents, who married and had another child, Violet, in 1882, followed Noyes and spent several years in the Niagara settlement before returning to Kenwood. George Miller worked for the various business ventures attached to the community, the most successful of which was Oneida Silver. During his son's adolescence, he managed the silver company's New York office. Kenneth attended the Horace Mann School, and in the 1890s took classes at the Art Students League, where he studied with the academic artists Kenyon Cox and H. Siddons Mowbray. Until World War I he maintained close ties with Kenwood, corresponding regularly with a cousin and friend and visiting his mother there during the summer. Miller established his residence in New York, where his attempts to earn a livelihood as an illustrator proved unsuccessful. He began earning a steady income as an art teacher, first at William Merritt Chase's New York School for Art (from 1899 until 1911, when it closed) and then at the Art Students League.^[14] Miller's first wife, Irma

Ferry—whom he married in 1898—came from Kenwood, although she had never been part of the original community. She and Miller divorced in 1911, and Miller married Helen Pendleton,^[*] a young art student with whom he had an apparently happy, if not always monogamous, marriage.^[15]

Despite the radicalism of the Oneidans' separation of reproductive demands from the pleasure of sex, the community's social and sexual ideologies continued to reflect both the sexual tensions and the patriarchal structures of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Louis Kern shows how community practice was designed to effect social order. Women in the settlement received respect without any accompanying alterations in material circumstances or roles. They held positions of authority in community kitchens and nurseries, and although they attended mutual-criticism sessions, male leaders made all policy decisions. Oneida doctrine held that women were in need of control. In contrast to the Victorian cult of true womanhood, which granted women moral superiority for chastening the sexually uncontrolled male, the Oneidan philosophy reversed the charge. Women were selfish and sexually licentious; their nature was grounded in base physicality. Male love was noble and unselfish. Male continence, a demonstration of greater self-control, not only signified male superiority but also protected the spiritual male from entrapment by female sexuality. In this ideology women became objectified goods, controlled by the male, who maintained his power over them by reserving his semen.^[16]

Conditioned by a biblical claim that man was above woman in all things and by a notion of biological difference that prescribed separate roles for men and women, most Oneida women accepted the doctrine of male superiority. Their rebellion in the late 1870s was shaped less by a demand for equal rights than by a desire to return to traditional monogamy and a family organization rooted in the ideology of separate spheres. This assertion of women's natural superiority within the family, conjoined with a belief in women's natural submissiveness and duty, challenged the values of Oneida and eventually undermined the all-encompassing yet precarious structures of social control.^[17]

Over the years Miller's intellectual response to the Oneida ideology was part rejection, part accommodation. The artist's belief in certain Oneidan ideals was not simply an extension of Oneidan values but the integration of Oneida's principles of sexual radicalism (and its attendant conflicts) into a particular segment of the larger New York intellectual milieu. Throughout the teens Miller lived near Green-

* Although I refer to all four artists by their surnames, when I discuss the male artists with their wives, all of whom took their husbands' names, I have sacrificed absolute consistency, attempting to balance one preference, for an egalitarian practice (i.e. Kenneth Hayes Miller and Helen Pendleton Miller), with another, for a straightforward style (i.e. Kenneth and Helen Miller). In a few instances I retain a male artist's surname alongside his wife's first name (i.e. Miller and Helen). While this may not be fully satisfying, it avoids making the marriage sound like a law practice (i.e. Miller and Miller).

wich Village, where many of the most radical new woman gathered, in company with male writers, social reformers, and literary figures, to articulate new forms of feminism, modern love, and socialism. One component of their sexual discourse focused on separating reproductive concerns from sexual pleasure—also a central concern in the Oneida community. At the same time, however, writers began to express what Ellen Kay Trimberger has defined as the desire "to combine mutual sexual fulfillment with interpersonal intimacy."^[18] Under the influence of the European writers Edward Carpenter and Ellen Key (an advocate of shared passion and friendship whose Love and Marriage Miller read avidly), Village intellectuals challenged the ideal of separate spheres. Where nineteenth-century feminists wanted to create more equal marriages by deemphasizing passion (and hence reproduction), thereby freeing women to enter the public sphere, their twentieth-century Village counterparts campaigned for birth control and advocated a psychological and sexual intimacy that would make men and women fully equal. Women would share men's public roles while males would share the domestic sphere.^[19]

In its most radical formulation this ideal of psychological and sexual intimacy and equality was short-lived, its fullest articulation, acceptance, and practice limited to the teens. By the 1920s it had become generalized as the middle-class ideal of companionate marriage. The intellectuals, many of them male, who continued to support the notion of sexual intimacy did so now in the context of marriage and family rather than a love relationship. Furthermore, in the less politically progressive climate of the postwar years a greater level of intimacy became possible as women refocused their energies, empathizing with men from the domestic sphere. The companionate ideal accommodated sexual intimacy without recognizing ideals of equality.^[20]

Like other middle-class intellectuals of his generation who had migrated to New York, Miller experimented with social and political radicalism in the teens. In 1916 he voted for the Socialist candidate Eugene Debs and marched with his suffragist wife Helen for "votes for women." His circle of literary acquaintances included Theodore Dreiser, a close friend whose social realist novels were singled out by Randolph Bourne in his New Republic book reviews for their direct and honest treatment of American life and sexual mores. Miller admired Van Wyck Brooks, Sherwood Anderson, and the literary and music critic Paul Rosenfeld, an avowed cultural nationalist, who proclaimed Miller an important modern American painter—along with Albert Ryder, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Alfred Stieglitz—in his 1924 publication Port of New York . Though Miller never mentions meeting Max Eastman, the artist was particularly interested in his literary criticism; Eastman was the editor of the radical New Masses whose political activism included his organizing a men's committee to support suffrage. Finally, during this period Miller embarked on a systematic study of the works of Freud. Although he wanted principally to understand the relation between the

unconscious and creativity, he also professed an interest in Freud's insights into femininity and human sexuality.^[21]

Miller's activities and interests also conformed to a generational pattern: short-lived political radicalism succeeded by conservatism in the twenties and thirties. Furthermore, his marriage made conventional demands on his wife while permitting him both greater independence and control. Miller supported the family primarily through teaching at the Art Students League. Although Helen Miller was also a practicing artist, she assumed all traditional familial duties, especially following the birth of their only daughter, Louise, in 1914. Throughout the teens, Miller and Helen seemed to have a close and intellectually stimulating relationship; they read literature to one another in the evenings, went out with friends, and became deeply interested in Freudian psychology.^[22] When Miller moved to his Fourteenth Street studio in 1923, the dynamics of the marriage changed. Armed with a new knowledge of Freud, the Millers evolved a more open, though still committed, relationship. During the week, Helen and Louise remained at the family home a short distance from the studio, where Miller lived during the week, returning home on the weekends. Around this time, Miller began a succession of liaisons with female art students. Helen and the current mistress presided over the weekly Wednesday afternoon teas Miller held in his studio for more than a decade.^[23]

Students and close friends who came to the teas have noted contradictions in Miller's personality and behavior. He was by many accounts a stern and exacting teacher, who imparted a wealth of knowledge to students but exerted a strong control over their production. Most considered him a deliberate and disciplined (if not talented) artist. They described his approach to painting and to life as intellectual and ascetic; one student called him an "uptight New Englander"—a reference, perhaps, to the Oneida ideal of male self-control.^[24] Alexander Brook, another student, once told Raphael Soyer, "When Miller is finished criticizing a painting of yours, you feel like pushing your foot through it."^[25] He was also described as sensitive and vulnerable to criticism—and as a man who possessed a deeply romantic and sensuous side.^[26]

Throughout the twenties and thirties, Miller continued to express great affection for Helen and Louise in notes penned from his studio.^[27] His correspondence with his mother—herself a fiercely independent yet loving woman—conveyed the devotion of a dutiful son. Although Miller's sexual behavior typified that of urban intellectuals in the teens and 1920s, his letters reveal that he continued to hold deeply conventional attitudes about women's separate roles. On more than one occasion, for example, Miller professed his inability to care for himself without Helen's nurturing skills. He often told his mother that Helen would have to explain Louise's progress since he had been too preoccupied with work to notice. At Christmas in 1915 he wrote, "I know you are hungry for news of Louise, what new words she has learned and new ways. I can't recall. Helen will not fail you in these topics I

am sure."^[28] Clearly he considered Helen's maternal responsibilities more significant than his paternal ones, more a part of her natural sphere of activity. Miller expressed great admiration for Helen's painting and accepted a woman's need to have outside interests. "Helen wants to get into some kind of practical work as Louise gets older," Miller wrote to his cousin Rhoda Dunn. "The business of being merely a wife and mother is too deadening for always."^[29] By "practical" he seems to have meant the feminized occupation of clerical work; several years later he expressed delight with Helen's progress in typing. In spite of Miller's concessions to modern womanhood, however, their companionate marriage centered around his own activities as teacher and artist, their emotional life around his needs, which he controlled. Helen's role was that of wife and mother first and artist last.^[30]

Miller's social and sexual behavior must be interpreted in light of his experiences both in the Oneida community and in Greenwich Village during the teens and twenties. He accepted the greater sexual freedom espoused in both communities, and he believed in human perfectionism and in male superiority as the means to social control. At the same time, his parents' accounts of Oneida's repressive measures made him suspicious of certain forms of radical social and political change. Studio liaisons notwithstanding, he clung to the ideal of companionate marriage. Then in the early 1930s, when he was close to sixty and when many younger artists joined the political Left, Miller expressed his deep reservations about all revolutionary activities. He rejected his own experience of what he called communism (Oneidan communism had aspirations very different from those of the intellectual Left of the thirties), arguing that individual rather than communal values must remain at the heart of the American political system.^[31]