SOURCE: "Time's Own River: The Three Major Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Winter, 1977, pp. 33-46.

In 1926, at the age of 45, Elizabeth Madox Roberts published her first novel, The Time of Man. It was immediately not only a popular success but a critical one, widely reviewed and praised. Sherwood Anderson said of it, "A wonderful performance. I am humble before it" [cited in Harry Modeen Campbell and Ruel E. Foster's Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist, 1956]. Two years later, Ford Madox Ford wrote in The Bookman that it was "the most beautiful individual piece of writing that has yet come out of America." By 1938, Miss Roberts had to her credit six more novels as well as volumes of poetry and short stories. One of the novels, The Great Meadow, is still considered among the best American historical novels ever written. Since her death in 1941, however, she has received little attention. In part, this can be traced to the reception given her 1935 novel, He Sent Forth A Raven. While this book probed more deeply into contemporary problems than her other works, its complexity and symbolic density presented formidable difficulties for her readers. Critic and general reader alike pronounced the book confusing and incoherent, a failure both philosophically and artistically. Her reputation continued to decline until today, 35 years later, she is in such obscurity that few recognize her name. Yet she has a style which is extraordinarily lyrical, precise, and intense, and an insight both profound and moving. She mastered the novel of sensibility and achieved her desire to combine realism and poetry—to get down on paper the inner consciousness of her heroines. She is a fine, interesting novelist who deserves reappraisal by present-day critics, particularly for the three novels considered here. I think it probable that with such attention she will eventually be judged as in the first rank of twentieth-century American novelists.

Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born on October 30, 1881, in Perry ville, Kentucky. She was a descendent of Anglo-Saxon pioneers who had settled in Virginia during the eighteenth century, then migrated over the Wilderness Road into Kentucky soon after Daniel Boone blazed the trail into that virgin country. Reared in genteel poverty, a situation not uncommon in the post-Civil War South, she was interested in writing from early childhood. Though an excellent student, lack of funds along with a delicate constitution and frequent ill health prevented her from continuing her formal education beyond an abortive first year at what later became the University of Kentucky. She turned to school teaching and from 1900 to 1910 taught in remote country schools around Springfield, Kentucky. She continued to write poetry privately and never gave up hope of going to college. Finally, 18 years after her first attempt, she was able to make a second, successful, try for college. She matriculated at the University of Chicago in 1917 and graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Philosophy with honors, as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and as the recipient of the Fiske Poetry Prize. She was 40 years old. The rest of her life, which was to be less than 20 years, she spent writing novels, poetry, and short stories. Unfortunately it was also spent battling constant illness and the malady, Hodgkin's disease, which eventually killed her in March, 1941.

Three underlying themes form the basis of all Roberts' works. First, her heroines are always engaged in a search for self, and their success in life depends upon their success in self-identification. A second theme is that the land is the wellspring of man's life. Only by maintaining a closeness to the soil can life be either productive or satisfying. Her heroines cannot sustain their balance nor can they embrace others in love unless they are a part of the dynamic powers of nature; if they lose this rapport they become disoriented, ill, and finally unable to function. The third major theme is that man's life on earth is but part of a cycle and has a meaning far beyond itself. As Roberts wrote in her journal notes, "The life design is one of birth, rise, decline, rise, decline … with the rise and fall again through the growth of these new beings spreading outward like Time's own river." The two novels generally agreed upon as Roberts' outstanding works, The Time of Man (1926) and The Great Meadow (1930), explicate these themes fully and with authority. However, there is a third novel, less well-known and not so well-received, which deserves equal attention—My Heart and My Flesh (1927). While the usual Roberts' themes are not as perfectly developed here as in her most famous works, the powerful treatment of the evils of miscegenation make this an important book in American literature and a fascinating link between Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Faulkner's "The Bear."

The first of Roberts' books, The Time of Man is stylistically and thematically the most perfect of her works. This is the story of Ellen Chesser, daughter and wife of wandering Kentucky tenant farmers. The story line is simple; it is in the method of presentation that the uniqueness of the book lies. While there is an external chronological narrative, the book is really the story of Ellen Chesser's soul, of the expanding of her sensibility and her consciousness—the story of the development of a woman seen from the point of view of her inner self. Nothing is real until it is realized in the mind of the heroine, and the book follows her outward journey by charting her inward one. Ellen herself is a representative of wandering man in a life cycle that is never ending. Roberts knew the tenant farmers from first-hand knowledge; she had lived among them and taught their children. But she felt the presentation of her material could not be effectively handled in a straightforward manner if the theme were to be of universal implication. "Admonitions for a plan—it is not to be autobiography. It must be higher art than that. Myself against the chaos of the world. Art before chaos." One way Roberts conveys Ellen's inner state is to put the girl's mental life in physical terms. Ellen's abstract thoughts and her emotions are made concrete, are articulated as physical images and actions. The opening sentence of the book, "Ellen wrote her name in the air with her fingers, Ellen Chesser … ," is a picture of a child physically articulating an unspoken inner thought—that she is a separate, identifiable being. Had Roberts simply said, "When Ellen Chesser was fourteen, she realized that she was a separate person," it would not have given a picture of Ellen actually perceiving the thought. Roberts' technique is much more dramatic, and therefore more effective.

The most graphic illustration of Ellen's mental life reflected in physical aspects occurs when her husband carries on an adulterous affair with a neighbor woman. He coincidentally impregnates Ellen, and in order to assuage his own guilt falsely accuses her of adultery. Ellen suffers a difficult and uncomfortable pregnancy as a result of her knowledge of his infidelity. The strife and discord of the family during this time are outward manifestations of Jasper's sin. Concomitantly, Ellen's suppressed violence poisons the helpless body within her own. Her inability to either control or ignore her husband's actions shatters her inner life as well. When she thinks of Jasper lying with Hester Shuck

in the crab thicket she wanted to go there and take her by the throat and choke the life back into her body until it hardened for death at last. At night, lying alone in her bed, she would want to go to the thicket with a knife in her hand, and her mind would keep remembering the knife in the kitchen beside the cups on the shelf.… Then she would … know that she would never so fall from her pride as to quarrel with Hester Shuck or to spy on the thicket or the river.

Ellen's hate and her pride combine to enthrall her in a destructive, frustrated state which destroys the health of the body within her body. She is unable to eat or to work or to sustain her family's physical needs until she can free herself from her emotional dépendance upon Jasper. When the baby is born sickly and doomed to die, it is apparent that the child has been blighted by the ugliness of Jasper's conduct and Ellen's bitter acceptance of this. The baby's first cry, "a strange wail, the thin cry of the new-born, seemed to be coming from Jasper as an old withered man, and Ellen covered the child with her arms and hid it in her bosom." These two physical acts, the stoical suffering alone and the acceptance of the wretched result of hate, make clear Ellen's inner consciousness of what is happening in her life. There is for her a fusion of experience and action that is more "real" than any fact of knowing, for it is the essence of knowledge.

Ellen's life is one of extreme poverty and enduring struggle; she never owns a home, not even temporarily. But though her life is one of wandering and of unceasing toil, it is not a tragedy but rather, a triumph over mundane reality. At the end of the book, Ellen thinks of life and muses,

Life and herself, one, comprehensible and entire, without flaw, with beginning and end, and on the instant she herself was imaged in the lucid thought. A sense of happiness surged over her and engulfed her thinking until she floated in a tide of sense and could not divide herself from the flood and could not now restore the memory of the clear fine image, gone in its own accompanying joy.

Man's life on earth is important because he can create his own kind and pass on life itself. Ellen does emerge triumphant, for though she has but meager material possessions, she has independence, love, and the ability to create intact and strengthened by her own experiences. The stark simplicity emphasizes the cyclical nature of Ellen's life, and the universality of her concerns gives the story its epic sweep and focuses the reader's awareness of Ellen as not just a simple folk figure, but the symbol of mankind and his wandering over the earth. The intense subjectiveness of the narrative sustains Ellen in the reader's consciousness while the style, unaffected and limpid, adds to the verisimilitude of an inarticulate though sensitive country girl.

The Great Meadow is the story of the early pioneers who followed Daniel Boone over the Trace into Kentucky and fashioned life out of the wilderness. But the book is more than an historical novel: it is an epic story of the eternal pioneers who are always going forward to create new worlds out of raw nature, of the Adam and Eve put down into a garden of Eden to make out of the fusion of themselves a civilization. The book also shows the typical Roberts heroine on a journey of inward discovery, and again the narrative structure is simple and direct. The time span is from 1774-1781, the period of the Revolutionary War, and there is a tripartite structural balance of Diony as a girl in settled Virginia, as a bride travelling to the wilderness and making a life there for her new family, and finally as a widow confronted with the necessities of increased self-reliance and the ultimate choice of her own destiny.

Roberts' theme in The Great Meadow was "to make a world out of chaos," and Berk and Diony were to typify the male and the female elements that were necessary to coalesce in order to produce this world. In her own words, "Berk … the type … who would drive Diony beyond herself, driving man forward, thrusting outward and forward through the trees and the stones. Attaining something beyond themselves. But when they arrive there it becomes the new beginning. The cycle of man on earth." This is the same theme as in The Time of Man—the endless, perfect cycle of perpetual labor to fashion life from experience and to always start anew—but this time it is to be shown as a dual effort of man and woman together. Furthermore, there is added significance here in the goal itself. It is not just the new and better place to live that Ellen Chesser was reaching for; it is Kentucky, the garden of Eden, the promised land. As such, it is a symbol of the goal of all American pioneers who pushed westward and settled the country. The Great Meadow is Kentucky, but it is also Ohio or Oregon or anywhere that people went to build a good and fruitful life for themselves and their children.

Roberts' secondary theme in this book, the necessity of the interaction of the male and the female, adds to the richness of both plot and characterization. The wilderness cannot be tamed, a new world cannot be made, unless Diony and Berk go forward together. Only by a spiritual combining of the sexes is civilization born, just as the physical combining produces a child. Diony, the essential woman, would be content to realize new worlds within herself, but her inner needs compel her to go beyond safe contemplation into dangerous action because she has a greater need—to find her being in the man she loves. And Berk is the essential man, the one who in spite of a need and a tenderness for woman would leave her behind because of his overwhelming drive to assert his physicalness upon the outside world. Roberts develops this theme by portraying Berk as the activist on an unending quest and Diony as the tender of the hearth, the one who faithfully waits behind.

As with Ellen Chesser, the development of Diony is shown internally. In this book, there is a specific mention of Bishop George Berkeley and of his book, The Principles of Human Knowledge. Berkeley was one of the major philosophical influences on Roberts, and Diony illustrates graphically this tenet that matter is of no importance until it is perceived by the senses. Nothing has any real existence outside the mind for Diony, and this is how she views all her experiences. Only as she perceives the wilderness internally does it become real to her. Concomitantly, she visualizes what will be made of the wilderness because of Berk and her and people like them. When she sets out on her bridal journey over the Trace, she understands in a blinding flash of insight that she is "the daughter of many" and the symbol of those who carry life forward to new lands. When they surmount the great wall of stone that is the last obstacle to the promised land, Diony is so overwhelmed with the experience that the physical hardships of the journey are forgotten and she feels only "a freshness as if the world were new-born."

Another significant aspect of the novel is the rooting of Diony and Berk and of all nature in sexual terms. The book does more than just portray Diony and Berk as Man and Woman; the relationship is explicitly physical and sexual. A basic metaphor throughout the book, this treatment of sex as an elemental life force is beautifully and powerfully handled. In passages reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence, Roberts concretizes the emotional abstraction of sex and at the same time poeticizes its physical element. When Diony looks at Berk her emotional response to him wells up in a physical reaction that makes her body, quite literally, feel her love. "Then her eyes would search his averted face and his drooping eyes, his unguarded mouth, and she would love him with a rush of passion that almost stilled her heart in its beat …" When her father refuses his consent to let Diony go with Berk, he denies Diony the right of her love as well. She feels this stifling of her passion as a physical thing and his words cause her to be "sickened by them until her breath was slow in her throat and her head bowed." Just before Diony and Berk's child is born, Berk must go farther into the wilderness to make salt and find game, and they know that Diony will probably bear the child before he returns.

"You're a strong man, Berk Jarvis," she said. "But one strength you have not got." She stood, large and full, beside the door.

"A woman's work is woman's work," he said. He smiled then, and of the beauty of his delayed smile went swiftly to some hidden part of her and made life beat more swiftly there.

Roberts clearly intends Berk, the male, to be characterized as a person of action and not words. Berk was "a quiet man" and part of his contrast to Diony lies in his very inarticulateness, emphasizing therefore his physical prowess. Unfortunately, this characterization is shattered at the supposed climax of the novel. Berk's mother has been killed in one of the numerous Indian raids. Determined to secure revenge, he goes off in search of the war party and is captured. After he has been gone for three years, Diony is persuaded he is dead and re-marries. A year later, he suddenly reappears; just as suddenly Roberts gives him the tongue of a backwoods Homer. His eloquent rendering of his odyssey in the far country and struggles to return wins Diony back. But the reader balks. That the silent Berk would emerge from years of privation and grim survival on an animal level suddenly gifted with a golden tongue is beyond the credibility of the most willing imagination.

In spite of the failure of the novel to end with a glorious climax that would have given it the epic sweep Roberts intended, The Great Meadow is still an impelling book. It convincingly depicts an incident of American history as a chapter in the story of man's civilization of the world, and it does this solely through the slowly expanding consciousness of the heroine. The novel thus is metaphysical as well as historical.

My Heart and My Flesh is a psychological and tortured Faulknerian work with a shocking subject delineated in gothic horror. Theodosia Bell, a pampered and neurotic young woman of superior birth, is forced by the profligacy of her family to lose her mind and nearly her life. "It is the story of a woman who went to hell and returned to walk among you." In spite of obvious differences, there is a great similarity between this novel and The Time of Man. The basic theme is much the same: man's time on earth is one of continual wandering and searching in the face of adversity for a better life. The ultimate goal is the discovery of the supremacy of the inner self and one's ability to express love which can happen only by remaining close to nature. But there is in this second novel an emphasis on a theme not found in The Time of Man. It is the danger of overweening pride, the fatal hubris of Greek tragedy. There is a knowledge of the self as evil and of the nature of evilness. Theodosia is just the opposite of gentle, humble Ellen Chesser who never expected to achieve more than the most modest position in life. When she does realize the power of her own affirmative nature, Ellen is really changed only in the sense of discovering something which she had possessed from the beginning. Conversely, Theodosia Bell has been born in an advantaged situation and she takes great pride in her family, personal charm, security, talent, and ambition. She is, like Ellen, extraordinarily sensitive, but her sensitivity serves as a selfish attribute, for she views others in the context of her ambitions. So, unlike Ellen, Theodosia must undergo a profound change; she must lose everything of which she is most proud, especially her high opinion of herself. She must learn that only her own spirit affirmatively rooted in love can overcome death. Until she is forced by the inexorable diminishing of her life to accept this bitter lesson, she is doomed to a process of degradation that carries her to the far side of hell. Roberts described Ellen Chesser's journey in search of her soul as one of "accretion" while she described Theodosia's as one of depletion:

The method here was a steady taking away until there was nothing left but the bare breath of the throat and the simplified spirit. The work begins with a being who has been reared in plenty and security … Family … Wealth … charm … popularity … musical skill and … a boundless ambition. All these gentle conceits are gathered into the person of Theodosia.

One by one these things are taken from her to the upbuilding of her understanding and the growth of tolerance and wisdom through suffering. Each of these is lost and more.

The tone of My Heart and My Flesh is, until the last chapter, one of extreme tension. Theodosia's search into the meaning of life is violent, anguished, and ruthless. At the nadir of her despair she cries out, "Oh God, I believe and there's nothing to believe." The horror of Theodosia's life is depicted by the horrible things that happen to her: one lover is burned to death, another callously and openly jilts her, a third seduces her when she is too weak to resist him. Her friends desert her and her family dies or disappears. Her father attempts to seduce her repeatedly, with the monstrous climax coming the moment after her grandfather (his father) dies and father and daughter are standing at the deathbed. The most staggering blow comes when she discovers she has three black, illegitimate siblings, for in the South of her day this was a shame not to be acknowledged. Still more terrible, the black brethren were the result of a liaison without any human tenderness or even fleeting concern; rather, they had been spawned in a moment of ruttish and casual carnality, her father having simply relieved himself into the female body most available when his lust pulled him into bestiality. One of those animal couplings was with a half-wit who lived in the alley behind the jail and it produced an animal of its own—the idiot stable boy, Stiggens. The horror is compounded for Theodosia when she finds she is not only heir to the results of her father's evil, she is heir to his propagation of evil. This is illustrated in a frantic and terrible scene where she incites one black half-sister to murder while bringing together the other with their black half-brother, Stiggins, in drunken incest. She is responsible for carrying to an awful conclusion the evil that her father begat.

This theme of miscegenation is the primary interest of the book today. It appears in no other Roberts' work and, in fact, her treatment of what was to become one of the dominant themes of Southern fiction is one of the first and most powerful of any artist. Except for Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), no book by a major writer discussing miscegenation openly had yet appeared. Because Roberts' treatment is so much more ruthless and direct than Twain's, the impact has a searing intensity that shows more clearly what a tragedy this was for the South. The writer who most immediately comes to mind as comparable in this regard is Faulkner, and the interesting thing here is to realize that this novel was published (1927) long before anything which Faulkner wrote on the subject appeared. Though Roberts' handling of this theme is not entirely successful since she does not pursue the evil to its ultimate end as does Faulkner, its inclusion makes this novel a major work.

Structurally, however, the book is flawed. The tone of her novel is uneven, ranging from a Wuthering Heights intensity to the calmness of a pastoral idyll. The moment of Theodosia's salvation is an unconvincing climax because at this point Roberts turns aside from her clear perception that miscegenation inevitably begats evil and violence and that the sins of the fathers can never be fully atoned for but must be passed on to each new generation. However, in spite of its flaws, My Heart and My Flesh is of great importance, both historically and intrinsically.

All three of these novels are fine enough to be compared favorably with the best of American fiction. At the same time, they illustrate Roberts' main problem as an artist. While she is able to portray her female characters sharply, deeply, and totally convincingly, her male figures never seem quite real. Her most memorable male is Stiggins, the half-witted Negro stable boy in My Heart and My Flesh; but, though powerfully drawn, he is hardly a man as much as he is an animal. Jasper and Jonas, the two men most central to Ellen Chesser's life in The Time of Man, are depicted with such vagueness that it is as though they are the same man wearing different masks, or perhaps different men wearing the same mask. In The Great Meadow, Diony is fully developed at the expense of Berk. Since he is never seen as an entity or a force apart from her, the lopsided portrayal of the characters weakens an intended theme of the novel: that male and female need to equally interact to successfully wrest life from the earth. Roberts' women are more than real; they are reality—the perfect unity whose very existence is self-expression. They swallow up the actuality of others by the beingness of themselves. In this light, it is fascinating to read the following note Roberts wrote to herself:

There is so much more to a woman than there is to a man. More complication. A woman is more closely identified with the earth, more real because deeper gifted with pain, danger, and a briefer life. More intense, richer in memory and feeling.

A man's machinery is all outside himself. A woman's deeply and dangerously inside. Amen.

It is interesting that she felt this way. It is also interesting to realize that all Roberts heroines are either raped or seduced or deserted by the men they love. One is arrested at the power and anger of the scenes of defloweration. It is in these scenes that Roberts reaches her strongest and most vivid effects. I am not suggesting that she had a psychological bias against men; she was not a feminist like Ellen Glasgow, and many of her male characters are warm and good. Journeyman, in the novel, Black Is My Truelove's Hair, is one of her most appealing characters. What I am suggesting is that Roberts' ability to turn inward and see life in the Berklerian sense is not only her greatest strength but her greatest weakness, for she could see only what was inside herself. When she depicts men as vulgar and brutal, it is a reflection of what she specifically knew about them—that their "machinery" (interesting word) was "outside."

Nevertheless, this flaw is not a fatal one, for there is much to appreciate in Roberts' best work. Nothing has been said here of her stylistic perfection and she could justly be praised for that alone. Haunting phrases and richly evocative descriptions can be found on any page of her books. Furthermore, the content of her work is of first importance. The problems with which she concerned herself are basic to humanity and she probes deeply into the meaning of life. Elizabeth Madox Roberts was a serious artist who felt keenly the responsibility of "art to enlarge one's experience, to add to man more tolerance, more forgiveness, to increase one's hold on all the out-lying spaces which are little realized in the come and go of every day." She was dedicated in her desire to expand the ability of the novel to add to man's understanding. While she is certainly a Southern writer, she is no more "regional" than is Twain or Frost. Indeed, she is more than merely an American writer, for her depictions of wandering man and the eternal quest for the meaning of life are both universal and timeless.