Gail Godwin, who was born in Alabama and raised in North Carolina but has lived in the Midwest and New York, is a novelist and short story writer concerned with the problems of developing self-identity and seeking the "best life." Many of Godwin's characters attempt to counteract their inclination to dream, or to retreat from life, by finding solutions to their problems by compromising their dream in life. When a character cannot find true love, when one wants to write the perfect book or article, or when one is searching for the perfect visual theme, these characters at last, after considerable brooding, act in order to cease the inactivity of dreaming: cutting off the love affair, committing suicide, or actually working. While perhaps not true in fact, the myth surrounding Southerners is that they are dreamers of an illusive reality based on unattainable absolute ideals. The role of the South in Godwin's novels is best seen as a welcome retreat from the harsh realities, sometimes from the North itself, but also as the root of an ambivalent perception of an illusive world of artificial conventions which prevents one's happiness.

The process of self-realization, of finding the "best life," often requires a comparison of what we are now with what we were and what we were raised to anticipate being. In times of broadening sex roles, such comparison leads us to reject or at least to question the ideals of childhood. In most of Godwin's novels the childhood is a Southern, genteel one which, although rejected by fleeing North, is not easily forgotten. In the novels considered here we are first introduced to the main characters, all women, after they have already left home, although they either return home for a visit or return through memory to re-create the period of growing up. Furthermore, even though they reject the models of their grandmothers, certain Southern traits stay with them. Although they philosophically reject the ways of the Old South, they are not emotionally ready or able to cut the tie totally. Beyond family ties and soft accents, the most significant positive trait is the willingness to dream, which Godwin seems to attribute to Southerners. When in Violet Clay (1978), for example, Violet imagines an interview she will hold after she becomes a famous artist, she anticipates the answer to the question, "Do you think yourself a Southern Painter?" Significantly, she does not answer either way: "—Well. I'm proud to share my birthplace with Allston. I was influenced by his 'Moonlit Landscape' when I was a young painter. But I was also influenced by Ryder, Inness, the Swiss Fuseli. I like the way they have of catching the mundane off guard, getting out of the preconceived everyday vision. Perhaps Southerners aren't as ashamed of being dreamers. But these painters were all dreamers." Allston, by the way, was born in South Carolina but later moved to Boston.

Many of Godwin's characters are raised in the South, the Carolinas, more specifically. Some works, such as Glass People (1972) and a few stories, only hint at the North Carolinian mountains and general geographical area. Others, such as Violet Clay and The Odd Woman (1974), are clearly Southern in origin. While Glass People presents the cosmopolitan present in conflict with a Southern past, the more recent novels, coincidentally more feminist, are clearly concerned with the effects of a genteel Southern upbringing. Such effects are not totally rejected since the heroines nostalgically look to the place and people of their origins. Interestingly, a progressive localizing has taken place in the six years between Glass People and Violet Clay: in the earlier novel Francesca's home, somewhere near Claretown, is not exactly stated; in The Odd Woman Jane Clifford returns to a non-specified Southern town which from the clues is Asheville; and Violet is raised on the Battery in Charleston.

In Glass People, although it has a Southern flavor, few obvious clues link Francesca to anything South. Before moving to California with her new husband, Cameron, and a brief separation in New York, Francesca has lived in an area that is mountainous and in the eastern half of the country. Since the crux of the novel appears to center on the interrelationships of the couple, and since Francesca herself does not perceive her difficulties to be associated with her upbringing entirely, the South plays a minor role in the workings of the novel.

The odd woman, Jane Clifford, on the other hand, generally localizes part of her conflicts in her Southernness. Jane feels odd not only because she is a Southerner out of her element but because even at home she does not accept or fit into the old ways. Jane, young and unmarried, is teaching literature at a large Midwestern university, much like Urbana, Illinois, where Godwin herself was teaching the year she wrote the novel. During the semester break Jane leaves the wintery North to "go South" to attend her grandmother's funeral. While the town is unspecified, allusions to Thomas Wolfe, the French Broad River, and the mountains suggest that she went to Asheville. There, she is reminded of her oddity in her family of at least somewhat conservative Southerners. The major source of contemplation, however, is the death of Edith, Jane's grandmother.

Edith, epitomizing the refined Southern matriarch, presents a source of conflict for Jane, who is constantly searching for the best and uncompromised in life. Proper, prone to fainting spells in stressful situations, taste in elegantly distinctive clothes, vain, and a bit deceitful, Jane's grandmother left fifteen pairs of white gloves and a "bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream behind a stack of dishes." Jane had been very close to her grandmother, often preferring her company to her stepfather's. Closely connected in memory is the story the grandmother often related about her sister, who ran off on the Northbound train to follow a traveling acting group. Great Aunt Cleva left with an actor and died ten months later, leaving a baby and a note on a theater program saying that the villain had left her and she was in grave trouble: "It was never too early, said Edith, to begin warning a girl of the price to be paid for certain kinds of folly…. You had your choice: a disastrous ending with a Villain: a satisfactory ending with a Good Man. The message was simple, according to Edith." She was to Jane an admirable old Southern lady who knew about refinement but who put all stock in propriety and happiness. She was, too, the source of conflict for Jane, who spends the entire novel contemplating the existence of eternal love. Ironically, Jane later discovers that Cleva had not run off with the actor who played the villain in the traveling melodrama, but the good man. Edith did not provide the answer Jane sought.

In Violet Clay the setting of Violet's early years is the South, primarily Charleston and her unspecified school in North Carolina. Violet's Charleston is romanticized only by her Uncle Ambrose's novel: otherwise, it is a place to remember, to be haunted by, to flee. The place is described in a negative light, an "inbred hothouse of a city," where the Library Society does not have Uncle Tom's Cabin, and where her mother drowned herself in the yacht basin when she learned of Violet's father's death in World War II. Violet's grandmother is a widow living in an antebellum mansion on the Battery, one of the most prestigious sections of Charleston, who must continually sell antiques as her resources diminish. When she dies, the house goes to the bank. Granny, too, is a strong matriarch much concerned about propriety. Although she adheres to the same concerns for gentility and tradition, she is not the same refined Edith; she allows much more reality to creep into her drunken conversations. Unlike Edith, who had no special talents, Violet's grandmother was a pianist trained to play professionally. Instead of auditioning in New York, however, she left Burnsville, North Carolina, to marry Mr. Clay from Charleston, raised their sons alone when he died, then had regrets when her fingers were no longer flexible. Granny felt she had wasted her talents on an antique-poor lawyer who did not provide for her as grandly as she had envisioned. Although a Southerner herself, she viewed herself as an "imported bride" in Charleston and was attracted to another outsider, a "large Yankee-voiced … disturber of the local mores," Violet's namesake. This woman who was brought to Charleston because of her husband's harbor work in 1920 was a dear friend of Granny's but was scorned by Violet. The "Big V.," as Violet called her grandmother's friend, was the opposite of refined Granny, who thought the same way as the large husky-voiced newcomer but would never remove the illusion of gentility and grace to demonstrate it. The young Violet wanted to be totally separate from the power and image of her godmother. We know that the Big V. taught Granny how to smoke, but we do not know when or how Granny started her large daily intake of gin, equally under cover. The first of many excuses Violet offers for not producing her "picture" is that she spent the summer between graduation and what was to have been her art career as an errand girl to the liquor store:

If only I didn't have to do errands for Granny, I would tell myself, I could get a head start on "the picture" this afternoon. But duty was duty, which was to go upstairs after lunch but never before one, by which time Granny was dressed and made up and regarded me with playful nonchalance, as though I'd been another one of the ghosts who inhabited her house. She would dole out some cash from a little enameled box meant for playing cards, which contained our weekly food and drink allowance. "Tell Mr. Dinwiddie we're expecting some people in, why don't you?" she would muse, on the days I went for the quart of gin.

In Violet's attempt to find out about her dead parents and fleeting heritage, gradually being sold to the antique dealers, she tries to find out more from her grandmother that summer. The alcoholic widow had a three-part story routine: one about sacrificing her music to marriage, another as a "warning against men—especially lawyers—and all their tricks," and then funny memories of her old friend, the Big V. Clearly Violet did not trust the advice coming from a gin-loosed mind because she ends the summer by marrying Lewis, the godmother's lawyer nephew. The last image of Granny is as the liquor store keeper found her: a year after Violet leaves, Mr. Dinwiddie misses Granny's regular stops, so he climbs in a window and discovers her body. She was able to maintain the illusion of decorum: "She was fully dressed, lying on her bed. Both bottle and glass were concealed in the flowered slop jar of an eighteenth-century commode beside the bed. Her face wore a mocking, triumphant little smile."

Violet's relationship with her grandmother and godmother, of course, is a further example of ambivalent Southern living. Young Violet, Southern by birth, is repulsed by the Yankee coarseness of her godmother. Interestingly, the matriarch, who on the outside always exhibited refined, cultured manners, thoroughly enjoyed the outgoing, nearly improper personality of her old friend. Although young Violet said she resented her godmother, perhaps out of jealousy but probably from lack of self-knowledge, she followed the actions of her grandmother and not her advice.

In most of Godwin's stories and novels, the heroines are to some extent at odds with the desire for fulfilling their lives and yet maintaining the security of old traditions which are forever changing but nevertheless provide ready answers. The old tradition for these women and for some of the men—is one of illusions: fashion, refinement, correctness, and perfection. The reason that the heroines literally flee and try to reject the notion of old Southern womanhood is that, when the grandmothers die, they take the last remnants of an institution that was already disintegrating. What even the next generation, the heroines' mothers, are unwilling to do is to believe or accept the older generation's idea of idealized social commitment or convention. Violet's own mother, a lower-class Southerner, committed suicide when her husband died, leaving her with a baby in his old Charleston home with Granny. Jane's mother ran off and married a reckless lover who died in the same war that killed Clay. She eventually married Edith's idea of a "good man," a conservative Southerner, because she gave up on the dream of finding the perfect combination: "I wanted a kind of marriage I knew my parents had not had: a marriage of passion and esteem. I wanted so many things it makes me sick to remember." In essence, Kitty, Jane's mother, tells her that she is living in a myth to be looking for perfect love. Gerda, an old friend whom Jane sees in Chicago on her way back to the Midwestern university town, tells her the same thing with less tact. Gerda, also Southern-fled, is now an active feminist and has rejected all ideas associated with the conventions and dreams of the South. The two women are at opposite ends of the visionary pole: dreamy idealization and bitter realism. Gerda, who has been burned in love, asks her friend, "Do you feel yourself trapped, Jane, when you least expect it, in all that old myth they sold us about Southern womanhood, having to be 'soft and feminine,' and all that crap? I do." She also feels disillusioned and spiteful, at the other end of the romantic spectrum: "God," she shouts at Jane, who rejects terming love "crap," "you're such a fence-sitting Southern bitch!… You can't bear the smell of reality." Jane, the dreamer of eternal happiness, is still sitting on the fence at the end of the novel. She imagines that Urbana's notorious "Enema Bandit" is about to break into her duplex apartment. She envisions being able to talk him out of victimizing her by telling him to take on her identity and to go South and find his "best life":

In a way I really feel for you…. Take my advice and get out of here. Go in my closet and dress yourself in my warmest clothes; take my purse … and start walking … to the bus station and take the first bus out and don't get off till you've reached the place where the snow melts away and you think you can turn your oddities inside out like a sock and find your own best life by making them work for you instead of being driven by them. That's the best advice I have to offer.

Even Violet, who has less illusion about the South, cannot break away entirely. She is willing to leave her husband in Greenville, go to New York to try to be a famous painter, get involved in private love affairs, but is still prevented from publicly being unladylike. One evening she is lonely and considers sitting at the piano bar where her Uncle Ambrose spent his leisure time, "But the ideals of Southern womanhood were still too strongly ingrained in me." When Violet is trying to meet people important to her career or personal interests, she is conscious of turning on her "Southern charm." Her Uncle Ambrose, himself the old Southern gentleman, long ago removed from Charleston, presented to Violet a graphic object lesson of procrastination, lethargy, and the ultimate despondence—suicide. Violet worries that his wife would compare him and her as dreamers, that she herself "shared some portion of Ambrose's swerving temperament." and that the wife "condemned the pair … as two indolent, capricious Southerners unable to stick to any project or relationship for long." Nevertheless, Violet may not perceive her inability to find the visual theme to get good work done so much a Southern problem as a personal one, unless it was the summer she stayed with Granny in Charleston and could not get work done for the heat and the errands to the liquor store. Uncle Ambrose's suicide, however, helps to jolt Violet into serious artistic activity which finally succeeds. We may not be aware of many Southern-based conflicts, however, since the story is told by Violet herself, who has not entirely cut off the years connected with her Southern experience. She is so much haunted by the Charleston ghosts that she seems to have taken the summer heat with her to New York and then is unable to move. When Violet leaves the South, her grandmother has already died; she deserts her husband and is cut from her namesake's will. She cuts physical ties but cannot entirely forget them; she, too, is on the fence and, like Jane, is only semi-liberated from her illusions.

So the conflict between self-fulfillment and the security of compromised conventions associated with old Southern convention is not entirely resolved in Godwin's novels. Like Violet's first successful painting, titled "Suspended Woman," these woman are suspended. In their own way they are searching for happiness, but as Jane's mother told her, outrageous happiness is a myth. Whether or not searching for perfect love and happiness is a typical Southern myth is moot; the real point is that the heroines feel part of being a Southerner involves such as search. Godwin's characters search for happiness through self-fulfillment and dreaming of absolutes. As in dreams, waking up sometimes brings fulfillment, failure, or continued search.