Caroline Gordon's angle of vision—the vantage point from which she regards the moving configurations of human existence—is primarily epic. As an intrinsic structure, that is, as one of the fundamental generic patterns, the epic is concerned with the ongoing of history. Within its broad expanse everything is sacrificed to an essentially eschatological thrust; for nothing less than the outcome of the human enterprise hangs upon the success of its heroic quest. Domestic life must be set aside for epic endeavors, even though the feminine spirit encloses the action as guide and goal. (p. 7)

If Miss Gordon's characters hurtle into the abyss, they do so as epic and not tragic figures. Epic heroes do not struggle as tragic heroes do against the gods. Theirs is not a lonely battle within themselves, a striving to find interior dimensions of being; rather, epic heroes endeavor to maintain manliness and courage in a communal and cosmic realm, obeying whatever divine imperatives are given them, following a code of honor in a society that is in perpetual disorder.

But though the world about which an epic poet writes is frequently disunified and confused, and though the hero himself may be blinded into taking a fatal false step, it is nonetheless a requisite that the imaginative light by which the writer views his scene be clear. No moral ambiguities must cloud the poet's—the novelist's—mind if he is to depict the heroic. (pp. 7-8)

Miss Gordon's chief effort as an artist—like that of most other significant twentieth-century writers—has been to find a usable sacral system—a myth—in a society increasingly secular and consequently detached from the major symbols within its own cultural heritage. The Christian structure, which, for Western society, appropriated the mythic house of the gods and provided for centuries our major cultural figures, has gradually lost its imagistic concreteness and become associated in the modern mind with a set of moral principles by which one ought to live or with fossilized phrases and gestures. (p. 8)

No writer in our time has been more concerned with [the reconciliation of pagan myth and Christian faith] than Caroline Gordon. Her early novels deal overtly with neither pagan myth nor Christian mystery; but, concerned with the polarities of thinking and feeling, they dramatize the feminine and masculine principles in a devastated society that cannot surrender itself to love and integration, where death is the over-arching enemy. (p. 10)

One can only speculate on Miss Gordon's choice of title [for an early story, "One against Thebes"]; but since it speaks quite clearly of the life dedicated to following "an insistent voice" it seems possible to consider her story a parable of the artist, following a vocation in the path of the serpent, seeking the crystal palace, encountering undeserved suffering, and redeemed finally from the doomed city of Thebes to bless the fortunate and just city of Athens. It is the child herself who will become the "one against Thebes"; but at the same time her father, Aleck Maury, like the aging Oedipus, is also in a sense pitted against the forces of death and destruction. The child—in the earlier story Sally Maury, the daughter of Aleck—is here referred to simply as "the child." She is the young artist, called by an inner voice to a life of observation, of absorption, of remythologizing. Like the little girl in "A Narrow Heart: The Portrait of a Woman,"… she is preoccupied with the qualities of things, with trying to know them as they are and as they establish themselves in consciousness. As an Anti-gone figure, she will have to guide and direct the humbled Oedipus and later take the part of the gods in struggle against the rationalistic edicts of Thebes. She will stand, like her father, as one against Thebes and will help to keep the city safe from the dragon's sons. But the artist is not, in Miss Gordon's view, the hero. The artist—the poet—is a seer, whose consciousness gives form to the total history of man. True, he observes the hero and appreciates him, understanding his courage and his mission because both have an inner voice to guide them, both are aware of dragons, both stand solitary over the abyss. Nevertheless, the artist has a different kind of toil: to construct an image of that essentially epic struggle. And though in this story Miss Gordon's referential imagination allies the child's father with the tragic figure of the old Oedipus, her view of him throughout the Aleck Maury stories has been cast in an epic, not a tragic, mold. (pp. 12-13)

One can speculate a bit further and conjecture that Miss Gordon's current novels, long under construction, depict these two basic realities to which contemporary man is related—the two supernatural dimensions in which he is enmeshed, with or without his awareness. The "lower pattern" of which she speaks is the primordial world of archetypes that, as she says, "lies at the bottom of every human consciousness." The "upper pattern" is no doubt a story of Christian conversion and of the workings of grace in a particular life, located in a specific place and time—a Dantesque story which will preserve the "actuality of events." (pp. 13-14)

With its "upper" and "lower" stories, Miss Gordon's writing is epic in accord with the two symbolic structures of which I have been speaking. On the mythopoeic level, the epic journey symbolizes a quest for the integration of the component parts of man; it is a search for wholeness, for the union of earth and sky gods. It requires a descent into darkness; its obstacles are women and death. Its virtues are magnanimity and valor. In contrast, the Christian epic speaks allegorically of the progress of the soul; a glimpse of love and joy—what Jacques Maritain calls a "flash of reality"—impels it on its quest. The obstacle to be overcome is sin; the journey is toward grace, toward light out of darkness; but there is nevertheless a confrontation of the abyss. Woman is the mediatrix of grace in this journey, the Beatrice figure who impels and guides.

That Caroline Gordon's novels—her long fiction—possess an epic cast should not be difficult to demonstrate, since even a cursory reading of them uncovers a largeness of canvas that customarily goes with the heroic mold. But I should like to maintain that even her short stories are shaped by an epic vision, though one may be obliged to consider many of them fragments of that wide and majestic outlook. In all of her stories the man does what he "must"; he follows a code of honor that is fundamentally destructive to the feminine ancestral principle. Miss Gordon's early novels demonstrate his unvarying defeat; but as her works reflect more of the Christian eschatology, her epic vision changes its tone from tragic to comic.

In one group of short stories written early in her career, Aleck Maury is the central epic hero—a man who has found in his youth the "secret life" of joy and danger in the ritual of the hunt. He must ponder what it is in nature that wild creatures, dogs, and hunters sense—something which renders life incalculably precious. It is this search for the life abundant that pulls Maury away from home and family in a lifelong pursuit of hunting and fishing—in a lifelong flight, too, as it turns out, from his mortal enemy, death. Miss Gordon's later work demonstrates more openly her reconciliation of the pagan and Christian tropologies, but these short pieces contain in their depths the same twofold view of reality. (pp. 14-15)

Aleck Maury is the modern Odysseus—the comic epic hero who must live by his wits and come to terms with women. But Maury is the product of a land in which there is no longer any active faith, even in a desperate "lost cause"; for, though the South which he represents and loves has kept to a precious heritage of courtesy and hospitality, its essential deism contains within itself no principle of regeneration…. Aleck Maury is no grand epic figure; he has grown up after a devastating war which has virtually destroyed his people (he faces a land in desperate disorder), yet his concern is not to restore the patria so much as to find a separate peace. (pp. 15-16)

Aleck Maury [is] a man who, for all his gentleness and apparent traditionalism, is a romantic and a modern—a "superfluous man," as Turgenev characterized the figure. He turns away from society to the hunt, not for any shared ritual—for his is a solitary pursuit—but for a romantic quest to seek in nature what Wordsworth called the "visionary gleam." Like Rousseau's "solitary walker," he finds in society the chains that would bind him to routine, the forces that would corrupt his delight. He savors the Rousseauistic "sweet sentiment of his own existence" in field or stream; and his relationship to nature itself is not sacramental and submissive, but calculating and eventually cunning. (p. 26)

Unlike the narrator in A Sportsman's Sketches who does his solitary walking to gain the wisdom of the serfs, to observe the human community, Maury prefers to be alone or to have a single companion, with whom he has no relation, except on a limited basis. When he deals with the folk, it is to trick wisdom out of them. He alters nature, as in such instances as his placing pieces of iron in a pond to make trout breed. He constantly thinks that he can "figure out" the laws of nature and is continually in search of devices to make fish seek the hook more readily.

Further, in his attitude toward his own learning, the classics exist for him as a kind of enhancement of life; he does not make of his study an entrance into wisdom and love. He is a modern Cartesian man: split between mind and body and desperately seeking wholeness. He is a modern pantheist, repelled by the womanishness of religion, having to seek the sacred far apart from society and, as long as he has a pond or a stream, not needing a God. (pp. 26-7)

Two visual images have … made up the poles of Aleck Maury's life—the one of a possum blazing down at him, illuminating all of creation with an inner fire; and the other of an old woman looking up and beyond him toward something transcendent that is nevertheless a real "presence." Both visions are on the boundary of death, both are ultimate testimony to something in reality that lies behind the face of nature. They boy spends his entire life searching unconsciously for what his Aunt must have seen. But he seeks it on the lower level, by looking into the burning eyes of the natural world, rather than by construing it metaphysically, looking beyond nature into the heart of being. It is only when he himself stands on the borderline of death, in his old age, that he is ready to choose: he is at the hour (and Miss Gordon underlines this word) that is for the Christian the moment of choice. (p. 28)