The nineteenth-century Southern woman of the middle class was assumed to be modest, submissive, frail, pious, given more to moral than to intellectual capabilities, whole-heartedly devoted to her family, and, above all, sexually pure. Her husband's role was to sustain, to guide, and, above all, to protect her…. [The reality of the Southern woman's position was that before] the war she faced the gargantuan task of overseeing all the domestic duties of a large family and many servants. During the war she of necessity took on the duties of the farm, and afterwards, widowed or with a veteran rendered incapable of work through physical or psychic wounds, managed the business that gradually usurped the agricultural economy. (pp. 67-8)

Lytle is a writer who is deeply aware of his Southern background…. [In his criticism, Lytle comments,] "… because of the prevailing sense of family, the matriarch became the defining image. The earlier insistence on purity, an ideal not always a fact, was not chivalric romanticism but a matter of family integrity, with the very practical aim of keeping the bloodlines sure and the inheritance meaningful." (p. 68)

Lytle's women, however, are not matriarchs in the stereotyped sense, nor are they in any ordinary way defining images. It is true that mothers (and not old maids) are prominent in his work, but they are not, as one might expect, the strong centers of the family…. [What] Lytle says about women in his criticism is inconsistent with the way he presents them in his fiction. This discrepancy is in itself significant, for it is indicative of the contrast between the myth and the reality of the Southern attitude toward women. (p. 69)

The Velvet Horn, an ambitious and ambiguous novel, has a female protagonist about whom there is a complex of attitudes…. [Julia] in no way attempts to dominate the scene, for she is herself a dismayingly passive figure. Her importance in the novel is a symbolic one and stems from the number of men who dance attention upon her…. She possesses all the characteristics of the stereotyped Southern lady except one—chastity. (p. 72)

[Julia's and her brother's] incestuous relationship is, according to Lytle, essential, for in an essay entitled "The Working Novelist and the Myth-making Process" he explains that the principal image of The Velvet Horn is that of incest: "the act symbolic of wholeness, not the wholeness of innocence but the strain toward a return to this state of being."… Furthermore, he sees incest as a particularly Southern phenomenon…. More importantly (and somewhat obscurely) he sees incest as an aspect of the Garden of Eden myth. The confusion and self-consciousness of the post-bellum South is analogous to the attitude of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden. They regard the world outside as chaotic and wish to retreat from it. (p. 74)

Before the Woman was separated from the Man's side in Eden, there was no distinction of sex; thus woman is the involuntary cause of evil, according to Lytle's criticism and fiction.

The women in Lytle's fiction do not fare well. For one thing, none of them are successful: Kate [in "Jericho, Jericho, Jericho"] fails in keeping the land in the family; Mrs. MacGregor [in "Mr. MacGregor"] fails in her attempt to dominate her husband; Julia fails in preserving her marriage and keeping the family line pure. It is also true that these are cold women: not one of them is presented as a loving individual, in a genuine spiritual union with her husband. Although the men in the fiction might idealize them in accordance with the Southern chivalric tradition, these matriarchs are presented as exceptions to the mythic idea of the Southern lady, and are decidedly not admirable characters. If, as Lytle asserts, the woman is the defining image of Southern society, it is a poor image indeed which his women define. (p. 77)