A History of American Literature

332 Making It New: 1900–1945

finished with all that.” “The storm and the hag-ridden dreams of the night were

over,” the reader is told, toward the conclusion of the novel,

and the land which had forgotten was waiting to take her back to its heart. Endurance.

Fortitude. The spirit of the land was flowing out again toward life. This was the perma-

nent self, she knew. This was what remained after the years had taken their bloom.

“I’m through with soft things,” Dorinda tells local people who complain that she is

“hard as stone.” “Yes, I’m hard,” she triumphantly declares. She is also “barren”:

although she nurtures other people’s children, and restores fertility to the family

farm, she has no offspring of her own. Barren Ground has been praised as an intense

account of personal and social redemption: a woman discovering her true vocation,

a representative figure anticipating a new social and economic order. It has also been

criticized for its drive toward emotional denial and a tough, even repressed heroine

who appears to excite too much sympathy in her creator. These are, surely, different

sides of the same coin. In this, her most successful fictional account of personal and

social change, Glasgow has her central character gravitate from what is perceived to

be the “female” principle to what is seen to be the “male” one. From the soft, yielding,

and passive, to the stalwart, unbending, and rock-ribbed: to adopt the vocabulary

only partly hidden in these and other narratives celebrating the “vein of iron” in

human character, Dorinda affirms her “secret self ” and, in the process, becomes a

man.

“I was a radical when everyone else was a conservative,” Glasgow declared in her

autobiography, written toward the end of her life, “and now I am a conservative

when others appear to be radical.” That comment certainly located a change that

took place in her thinking. Her last full-length novel, In This Our Life (1941), meas-

ures the change. Its central character, Asa Timberlake, an older person like Glasgow

herself, is a gentleman of the old school and he is allowed to offer a largely negative

judgment on his children, grandchildren – and also on contemporary life. The

“elegance, grace, dignity and beauty” of “the old days” have vanished, the reader is

told, there has been a “general breaking-up in the pattern of life.” “Nobody ... had

any patience, nowadays, with the graces of living,” Asa laments. Whatever she might

like to think, however, Glasgow was no more exceptional in this, her old age, than

she had been in her youth. Her earlier books shared the optimism of those writers at

the turn of the century who saw the general social changes that were taking place as

potentially liberating, not least for women. Her last few works, in turn, belong to

that vein of writing, from the South and elsewhere, that sought in the past and

tradition a refuge from, and possible corrective to, the upheavals of capitalism and

modernity. Glasgow’s work is, in any event, conflicted, offering what a later Southern

writer, Allen Tate, rather testily referred to as a “mixed thesis of old South and

Progress.” Even in the satirical novels there is affection for the old ways that, after all,

her own mother represented. Even in the heroic fiction there is the only partially

repressed sense that success has its price, requiring that people become like her

father – hard, stubborn, and unbending. Those conflicts, though, only complicate

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