Caroline Gordon Short Fiction Analysis
A modernist in style and technique, Caroline Gordon is decidedly antimodern in the themes of her writings. Among American authors, she is similar to Willa Cather in decrying the spiritual corruption of the modern industrial age and in lauding as an ideal a return to the humanistic values of an agrarian society. While the frontier serves as the backdrop for Willa Cather’s idealizations of pastoralism, the South and its heritage provide the setting for romantic explorations of Nature’s influence upon human beings’ ethical development in Gordon’s fiction.
The thematics of Gordon’s fiction and her own avowed interest in the southern gestalt identify her strongly with the literary movement known as the Southern Renaissance. Initiated around 1920 and encompassing the Fugitive writers, the movement worked to revive through art and literature a rebirth of interest in southern ideals and values, particularly those of the agrarian, pre-Civil War South. The renaissance in southern letters strove to eliminate from portrayals of the South the false sentimentality and excessive romanticism characteristic of the writings of the Old South and to uphold, instead, the view of the South as the repository of humanistic values and a viable alternative to the dehumanizing effects of modern materialism and industrialization. The views of the Southern Renaissance can be seen most clearly in Gordon’s choice of heroes in her fiction. Her heroes generally are emblematic of the southern agrarian ideal, individualistic, self-reliant characters exemplifying a deep love of Nature and a respect for the values of community and family heritage. A strong sense of place or devotion to the land as symbolic of higher spiritual qualities in human existence is also readily apparent, together with respect for those characters who shape their destinies in accord with ethical values.
A number of Gordon’s heroes in her fiction are sportsmen whose dedicated passion for Nature is the focal point of their lives and the source of their awareness of aesthetic and spiritual values. From their relationship with Nature, they learn moral lessons which inspire them to the higher values of courage, compassion, and sacrifice. Often, the sportsman hero is contrasted directly with those characters of lessened moral awareness who see Nature as only a means to an end of self-gratification or materialistic greed.
“The Last Day in the Field”
Typical of the sportsman hero is Aleck Maury, the protagonist of “The Last Day in the Field” and a character who appears in several of Gordon’s short stories in The Forest of the South and in the novel Aleck Maury, Sportsman, published in London as Pastimes of Aleck Maury, The Life of a True Sportsman. In “The Last Day in the Field,” Aleck Maury is presented to the reader as a once-vigorous sportsman now grown old and having to confront both his own physical limitations and his own mortality. Aleck is like “the fall when the leaves stayed green so long”; in watching the progress of the frost on the elderberry bushes, he sees symbolized his own existence: “The lower, spreading branches had turned yellow and were already sinking to the ground but the leaves in the top clusters still stood up stiff and straight.” Thinking of how the frost creeps higher out of the ground each night, Aleck remarks to himself, “Ah-ha, it’ll get you yet!” aware that old age will take its toll upon him soon—but not before he has his “last day in the field.”
Aleck’s wife, Molly, urges him not to hunt this year, reminding him of the pain in his leg from a previous hunting injury; at first Aleck agrees to her wisdom, but when...
(This entire section contains 2853 words.)
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the killing frost comes, bringing with it the scents and colors of the perfect hunting day, Aleck is off before dawn to awaken Joe Thomas, the young man next door, and go quail hunting. The two men experience the ritualistic pleasure of preparing for the hunt, with Aleck making some sandwiches and coffee to take on the trip while Joe hitches up the buggy and gathers up the hunting gear. When all is ready in preparation, the men get the dogs, Bob and Judy, a matched set of liver-and-white pointers and two of the finest hunting dogs in the country.
The ride from Gloversville to Spring Creek takes more than an hour, and when the men arrive the dogs are eager to track down some quail. Joe sets the dogs free, and they find their first bevy of quail in the bottomlands of a corn field. Joe takes the easiest shot and bags a bird; Aleck, characteristically, takes the shot requiring the most skill and patience and gets the best bird of the lot. After several more shots at singles, the men stop to eat lunch. Aleck notices Bob, the hunting dog, and senses an empathetic comradeship with his spirit. Aleck reflects, “I looked at him and thought how different he was from his mate and like some dogs I had known—and men, too—who lived only for hunting and could never get enough no matter how long the day was.” The men walk through several more fields, and Aleck feels the pain building steadily in his leg. He wonders if he will be able to make it through the day, at the same time that he laments deeply that the day is going by so quickly and soon the perfect hunting day of this season will be over. Joe misses an easy shot, and Aleck shares with him some of his accumulated wisdom gathered through many such days in the field. An empathy develops between the two men, and Aleck feels even more keenly his own age and a deep longing to be young again and have so much time ahead.
At twilight, the men begin the walk back to the buggy. Aleck’s leg is hurting him badly, and he fears that he cannot make the journey back. At that moment, the men climb a fence and come out at one end of a long field, “as birdy a place as ever I saw,” Aleck thinks to himself, and Aleck knows that no matter how much pain he is in he has to hunt that field, “leg or no leg.” Aleck and Joe shoot two quail, and, as Aleck is retreating from the field, he spots Bob making a perfect sighting and points on the last quail from the last covey of the day. “Your shot,” Aleck tells Joe, but Joe replies, “No, you take it.” In the fading light, Aleck gets the bird with the third shot. “I saw it there for a second, its wings black against the gold light, before, wings still spread, it came whirling down, like an autumn leaf, like the leaves that were everywhere about us, all over the ground.”
“The Last Day in the Field” is a descriptive story, working to capture a mood and a setting as a man who loves hunting faces the fact that he must soon give it up and seeks to draw all the beauty, feeling, and meaning he can from his last experience. The story’s action line is a simple one, and there are no major plot twists or conflicts to be resolved. What gives the story its effect and power is its sustained tonal qualities of mood, imagery, and setting that subtly suggest much about Aleck Maury and the world he faces. Contrasting images—the green of fall and the frost of winter, the sunrise of the perfect hunting day and its peaceful close at sunset, Aleck’s age and Joe’s youth, Molly’s practical wisdom and Aleck’s passionate response to the beauty and energy of Nature—combine to create in the reader the mood of “the last day in the field” and to convey the insights acquired in these final moments by a man whose spirit is attuned to the meanings and fulfillment Nature has to impart.
“One Against Thebes”
The romanticism that pervades much of Gordon’s writing reaches its fullest expression in the story “One Against Thebes,” a rewritten version of her first published story, “Summer Dust.” The line of thematic development presented is almost Keatsian in asserting the primacy of the imagination over the limitations of the real and clearly defined, and there is, too, in the story a strong romantic emphasis upon the beauty of youth and innocence in contrast to the world of experience in which values and the human spirit become corrupted by expediency and failures of moral courage.
The epigraph of the story, “That you shall forever hold this city safe from the men of Thebes, the dragon’s sons,” indicates that the story’s theme is evil and the necessity to protect the city, or human civilization, from evil’s encroachment. The inhabitants of Thebes were said to be descended from dragons and to have borne serpent’s tails in earlier times. This motif is presented in the story through a number of images which restate the theme of the serpent and emphasize the omnipresence of evil.
The story’s protagonist, a small girl, is walking along a dusty road in midsummer. Ahead of her walks a black girl, a black woman, and a black boy; the boy runs behind the woman and lurches from side to side of the road, stirring up clouds of dust that spiral in a trail at his feet. The child looks at the trail and thinks “how it might have been made by a great snake, a serpent as large as any one of them, hurling itself now to one side of the road, now to the other, and thinks, too, how she and the other girl and the boy and even the old woman seem to move in its coils.”
The girl’s vision of the serpent trail Son has made in the dust as he plays along the road foreshadows her first encounter with evil—a woman, obsessed with greed, who tries to claim for herself peaches that belong to the girl’s grandmother; two young men who run a horse several miles, “in August, too, when you’re not supposed to lather horses”; and the poverty and loneliness of an old black woman, Aunt Emily, who lives in one of the cabins “in a row back of the big house.” The images of imperfection and suffering in the world leave the girl frightened and filled with revulsion, while her older brother’s apparent wisdom about the ways of the world and his discussion of “grownup” matters she does not understand leave her confused and isolated. The girl, however, is the only character in the story capable of an act of kindness and of envisioning a better world than the one she encounters. In a moment of empathy and generosity, she slips the Green Fairy Book she has read many times into Son’s jacket pocket, knowing all the while she will never see the book again. Son runs off to play in the road again, when he comes to a spot where “the trail his feet had made earlier in the afternoon still showed he would whack the dust—as if he were trying the beat a snake to death.” The girl follows slowly behind him, “stepping to one side of the road to avoid the serpentine trail that Son’s feet had left in the dust.” As she walks along the road and clouds of dust envelop her, she recalls the words from the fairy book about how the Fairy Godmother said to the Little Princess that they would ride a cloud to the crystal palace in the woods and there would be waiting for them a gold crown, silver slippers, and a silver veil embroidered with the sun, the moon, and the stars. The concluding image is of the child lost in dream visions of an ideal world in which an escape from ugliness and evil is possible. In the real world, where no such escape is truly possible, the only avenue of amelioration is compassion and the strength to ward off the serpent.
“The Ice House”
One of Gordon’s most undervalued stories is “The Ice House,” a work which expresses both her interest in southern themes and her allegiance to humanistic values. The story takes place a year after the Civil War and is set in an old ice house in the South where the bodies of Union soldiers were hurriedly buried during a battle in 1862. The story focuses upon two young southern boys, Doug and Raeburn, and a Yankee contractor. The contractor has hired the boys to go into the ice house and dig up the skeletons of the Union soldiers, which he will then place in coffins and deliver to the United States government at so much “a head.” After a day of long, hard labor, the contractor pays the boys and tells them he won’t be needing them any longer. The boys are surprised, since they were originally told they would be hired for three or four days’ work. Doug hangs back in some bushes to see what the contractor will do after they leave and discovers that the man is rearranging the skeletons in the pine coffins. When Raeburn asks Doug what he thinks the contractor is doing, Doug responds, “He dividing up them skeletons so he can get paid double.” Later, walking home, Doug stops and tells Raeburn, “There ain’t a whole man in any one of them boxes. If that ain’t a Yankee fer ye!”
The story would be a slight one in both meaning and impact were it not for the fact that Gordon uses it to contrast, through the characters of Doug and Raeburn, the values of materialism and the values of humanism. Doug shares the values and the worldview of the Yankee contractor; he is a materialist at heart, interested only in opportunity and economic gain. When the boys meet on the road to begin the job, it is Doug who chides Raeburn for being late and for not being excited about all the money they are going to make. When he senses that Raeburn feels uneasy about digging up dead bodies, Doug tells him he can always get somebody else. Digging up the bodies is just a job to Doug, and he is not personally involved with it as Raeburn is. “Handlin’ a dead Yankee ain’t no more to me,” Doug says, “than handlin’ a dead hawg.” As the two boys arrive, the Yankee contractor calls out to them, “Well boys, I see you’re like me. Early risers.” The emphasis here is upon the work ethic, and Doug is very much a product of this mind-set, while Raeburn prefers to be a little late and at least get his breakfast. Doug is the first to take a pick and begin the gruesome business of unearthing the bodies after the contractor tells them the faster they get done the sooner they get their money. Raeburn hesitates and moves more slowly, aware of what lies ahead.
As the work progresses, Doug is largely insensitive to the skeletons he unearths and to the lives they once contained. Raeburn, however, pauses to look out over the field where the battle was fought and envisions the suffering that must have occurred. When the boys and the contractor break for lunch, Raeburn cannot eat because of a “sick feeling” that sweeps over him. Doug suffers from no such problem and spends the period discussing with the contractor government jobs and whether the man is paid by the day or by the job. When the boys tell the contractor they plan to do farm work after this job, he tells them that farm work is “all right if you can’t get nothing else to do” but that smart young boys like they are should be “looking out for oppertunity.” He adds, “The folks at home all thought I was mighty foolish when I come down to this country, but I knew they was oppertunity in the South bound to be.”
The contractor, like Doug, sees the South and the skeletons in the ice house as “oppertunity.” The reasons the men died and the values they fought to uphold have no meaning. The materialism of the post-Civil War era is rampant; it has invaded the ice house and turned the skeletons of men who died believing in a cause into so many dollars of profit per coffin. The stark contrast in moral values in the story is between the exploiters, who simply profit from other men’s battles, and the believers, like the soldiers, who are capable of commitments beyond the self and of sacrifices at great cost. “The Ice House” confirms Gordon’s belief, apparent in the entire canon of her writings, that the battle of the modern era is not between sectional rivalries but between those sensitive to man’s potential for higher ideals and spiritual purpose in his life and those who wish only to exploit and corrupt for their own self-serving purposes.