330 Making It New: 1900–1945and then returns to his hotel. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly
hears himself saying, as he sits outside. That comment is perfectly in tone with the
feeling which has determined his life, that a life denied is a life fulfilled. It was a feel-
ing that shaped an old New York society, now vanished, the portrait of which forms
the substance of the book. And it is a feeling that Wharton, looking back with a
mixture of affection, compassion, and irony, seems now, with whatever reservations,
to share.
As a Southern writer, Ellen Glasgow bridged the gap between the hopefulness of
the Reconstruction era and the traditionalism of what became known as the Southern
renaissance. As a woman writer, she divided her attention between affectionately
satirical accounts of the Southern cult of white womanhood, in novels like Virginia
(1913), and heroic portraits of women redeeming themselves through stoical endur-
ance of suffering and stubborn labor in the soil, in such books as Barren Ground
(1925) and Vein of Iron (1935). Glasgow herself, born into a wealthy family in
Richmond, Virginia, was imaginatively torn between her mother, a “perfect flower of
Southern culture” as her daughter called her, with a mixture of awe and irony, and
her father, a successful businessman who was, Glasgow recalled, “stalwart, unbend-
ing, rock-ribbed with Calvinism.” “Everything in me, mental or physical, I owe to my
mother,” Glasgow insisted in her autobiography, The Woman Within (1954). And,
certainly, Glasgow learned from her mother about ancestral pride, the burden of the
past and tradition, and the sad story of Southern decline. But, whether she was
willing to admit it or not, she learned a lot from her father too: a determination to
succeed, a pursuit of authority (in this case, the authority of authorship) and, above
all, an interest in that “vein of iron” that enabled individuals to survive and allowed
Southern and American society to evolve from the old to the new. “It is possible that
from that union of opposites,” Glasgow admitted, of her mother and father, “I derived
a perpetual conflict of types.” And that was surely true. Her fiction revolves around
antinomies that were caught in her own personal version of the family romance:
the female emblem of the Old South and the male emblem of the New South, the
romance of the past and the reality of the present, the fluid, yielding “feminine” and
the rigid, authoritative “masculine.” The perspective in her fiction varies, but it does
so because of the different strategies she deploys for examining those “types” – and
the way she tends to vacillate, in terms of sympathy, between them.
The stance from which Glasgow started her career was a simple one. This was to
work from the premise that the old feudal order was decaying, in the South and
elsewhere, and that the “plain man” was “building the structure of the future” that
would replace it. From that premise, she developed two fictional strategies to explain
its implications. One was the strategy of comedy: a satirical inventory of the
weaknesses of the “aristocratical” person, the aim being to show how “stationary and
antiquated” he was. The other was more in the heroic line. It required Glasgow to
concentrate her attention on the poorer white and the qualities, latent in his
character, that appeared to guarantee eventual success – and this as a prelude to the
presentation of his actual success story. The result was to create two different types
of novel. Glasgow herself liked to refer to them as “novels of history” or “of theGGray_c04.indd 330ray_c 04 .indd 330 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM