402 Making It New: 1900–1945report, but the book is much more than a tough account of life among the rural
poor. “I began to think of the wandering tenant farmer of our regions as offering a
symbol for an Odyssey of Man,” Roberts said, as she described how she came to
write her most famous novel. And what The Time of Man does is precisely to give
Ellen’s life as “wanderer buffeted about by the fates and the weathers” an epic
dimension, to make the reader believe in the possibility of heroism. There is a
constant tension in the novel between its documentary level, which tells us of what
is, and what might be called the level of dream or desire, which intimates to us just
what might be. Roberts’s strategy for realizing this other level is simple: she makes
us share in the consciousness of Ellen Chesser and her imagining of “some better
country” where her mental and material needs might be met. The reader is invited
to witness the act of the mind, the continuing attempts to build an ideal, a possibility
out of the ruins of the actual. Ellen manages not just to survive life but to change it,
since her need for a better condition of things is perceived as an agent of
transformation as well as an act of transcendence. The agrarian dream, of a world in
which each moment of farm life becomes meaningful, enables her to keep on going,
it may be, but it also furnishes the simplest of her routines with a quality of ritual; it
breathes life, and the sense of an almost sacramental significance, into even the most
ordinary and everyday of tasks. Roberts is not subscribing here to the kind of
idealism that denies the pressure of the actual; among other things, The Time of Man
is a vividly naturalistic fiction. But she is imputing as much power to the mind, and
again in this case the female mind, as to matter in the creation of the real. As a result,
her heroine can use her idea of the good life actively to improve her condition;
somehow, thanks to the sheer energy of her needing and thinking, she can achieve
real moments of redemption.
Whereas Roberts set much of her work in her native Kentucky, Djuna Barnes
went much further afield, in fact and imagination. Born in the state of New York,
she worked in New York City before moving to Paris where, enjoying the company
of other expatriates, she wrote novels, plays, short stories, and poems. While still
in New York, she was associated with the experimental theater company the
Provincetown Players, who produced three of her one-act plays. Her first publica-
tion was a collection of poems, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915); her stories and
short plays were collected in A Book (1923); and her first published novel was
Ryder (1929), a satiric chronicle of family history. But her major work is Nightwood
(1936), an intensely poetic novel that T. S. Eliot described as having “a quality of
horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” Focusing on the
relationships of a group of expatriates in Paris and Berlin, Nightwood transforms
its author’s affair with a sculptor, Thelma Wood, into a study of relationships
between women. Thelma becomes one of the main characters, Robin Vote, a
“ somnambule” and figure of the night. Other characters include Nora Flood, an
American who becomes Robin’s lover and who is the emotional center of the book;
Jenny Petherbridge, a cultural parasite who takes Robin away from Nora; Felix
Volkbein, a German Jew in search of a history and family whom Robin marries; and
Doctor Matthew O’Connor, an Irish-American unlicensed gynecologist and studentGGray_c04.indd 402ray_c 04 .indd 402 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM