A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 331

town,” on the one hand, and “novels of the country” on the other. Among the books

in the first mode, along with Virginia, were Life and Gabriella (1913), The Romantic

Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932).

Among those in the second, together with Barren Ground and Vein of Iron, were The

Voice of the People (1900), The Romance of a Plain Man (1909), The Miller of Old

Church (1911), and One Man in His Time (1922). For all the differences between the

two veins of writing, though, the same optimism managed to shine through them

both and betray their common authorship; satire and heroic tale were equally shaped

by the conviction that the small farm was about to secure the state.

Among the satirical novels, the most accomplished are what Glasgow called the

Queenborough trilogy, after the district of Richmond in which they are set: The

Romantic Comedians, They Stooped to Folly, and The Sheltered Life. In each of these

the reader is presented with persuasive examples of different women whose lives and

personalities have been repressed and distorted by the story of them a man wants to

tell. The point is a fundamentally social one and is often made more or less explicit.

Here, for instance, is Virginius Littlepage, the main character in They Stooped to

Folly, meditating on the women in his life and the changes in sexual mores he has

witnessed:

If only women had been satisfied to remain protected, how much pleasanter the world,

even the changing modern world, might be today! If only they had been satisfied to

wait in patience, not to seek after happiness! For it seemed to him ... that there could

be nothing nobler in women than the beauty of long waiting and wifely forbearance ...

the true feminine character had never flowered more perfectly than in the sheltered

garden of Southern tradition.

The misrecognition of women by Virginius and those like him, Glasgow intimates,

has a specific social origin. It is of a recognizably local kind, nurtured by “the

sheltered garden of Southern tradition”; and the implication, here and throughout

the novel, is that the ironic conflicts contained in such an attitude have been as

responsible for the collapse of an entire class as the more obviously material facts of

defeat and economic ruin.

Glasgow once declared that “what the South needs now is – blood and irony.”

Irony there is, in plenty, in the Queenborough trilogy. The blood is shed, spent

imaginatively, in the heroic novels: where the reader encounters men and women of

such nerve and resolve that, we are told, their “secret self ” “could not yield, could not

bend, could not be broken” even under enormous pressure. Of the novels of this

kind, the most powerful is Barren Ground, which Glasgow called “the truest novel

ever written.” It tells the story of Dorinda Oakley. Forsaken by the man she loves,

suffering poverty and injury, she fights back. She restores the family farm, which

because of all its barren ground has fallen into decay. She shelters the man she once

loved when he returns, degenerated and desperate. But she no longer loves him; and,

having been married once, to a man whom she liked rather than loved who has now

passed away, she plans never to marry again. She is, she reflects, thankful “to have

GGray_c04.indd 331ray_c 04 .indd 331 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM