SOURCE: Gray, Richard. “‘To Escape from the Provincial’: Ellen Glasgow, the Matter of Virginia, and the Story of the South.” In Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism, pp. 36-95. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Gray addresses historical and biographical elements at work in the early fiction of Ellen Glasgow.]

Ellen Glasgow was reluctant to think of herself as a Southern writer. She wanted, she declared, “to escape … from the provincial to the universal;” and her subject was human nature in the South, not the Southern nature. Like Poe, however, she was happy to claim the role of Virginian. “I am a Virginian,” she once declared, “in every drop of my blood and pulse of my heart.” And, unlike Poe, that claim was relatively easy to defend. She was, after all, born in the heart of the former Confederacy: in a large house in Richmond, Virginia—the town where she was to spend most of her life. Born only eight years after the end of the Civil War, she was also brought up in a family that seemed to contain within it some of the major tensions of those postwar years. Glasgow's mother, Anne Jane Gholson Glasgow, came from a family of jurists claiming descent from the early English settlers of Virginia. “Everything in me, mental or physical, I owe to my mother,”¹ Glasgow later insisted. Certainly, the daughter learned from her mother about ancestral pride, the burden of the past and tradition—and, not least, about the sad story of decline. By the time Ellen Glasgow was born, in fact, Anne Glasgow had had seven other children. She was to go on to have a total of ten, with an eleventh stillborn. Pregnancy and child rearing, the burden of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the curious fate of trying to be a Southern lady—which meant, among other things, to deny substantial parts of her own self: this malign mixture had made of this proud descendant of a first family, not only “the perfect flower of Southern culture,” “a perfect flower of the Tidewater” as her adoring daughter saw her, but someone “worn … to a beautiful shadow.” A ghost in a way, in Ellen Glasgow's eyes Anne Glasgow was someone who had simultaneously lived too much and too little: too much in terms of the burdens she had had to carry, too little in terms of her own personal needs. The father could not have been more different. In her more charitable moments, Ellen Glasgow described Francis Thomas Glasgow as “stalwart, unbending, rock-ribbed with Calvinism.” As a successful businessman, who operated the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond from 1849 to 1912, he was a living embodiment of all those forces in the postwar South that were steadily transforming its economic and social structures. As a figure, in the eyes of his daughter, “more patriarchal than paternal,” who combined unbending authority and devotion to a God who “savored the strong smoke of blood and sacrifice” with numerous sexual intrigues—often with the black servants of the house—he was something else as well: an emblem of male power, mainly malevolent. Of a very different family strain from his wife—“a descendant of Scottish Calvinists,” as Ellen Glasgow put it—Francis Thomas Glasgow had all the energy and all the authority that came from having history on his side, and from being a man in a world run by men.

“I had the misfortune … to inherit a long conflict of types,” Glasgow admitted. The conflict is so fundamental, in fact, that it seems almost too pat, too neat. The female emblem of the Old South and the male emblem of the New South, the romance of the past and the reality of the present, the fluid, yielding (and, in this instance, fading) “feminine” and the rigid, authoritative “masculine”: antinomies like these were caught in Ellen Glasgow's own personal family romance. Not only that, true to her habit of analyzing and articulating the hidden determinants of character, Glasgow even drew attention to the opposites that constituted her inheritance; in effect, she tried to explain herself as fully as she usually tried to explain her fictional characters. “It is possible that from that union of opposites, I derived a perpetual conflict of types,”² she helpfully suggested in her autobiography The Woman Within. Which is true, up to a point: among other things, this would help to explain why nearly all commentary on Glasgow's fiction revolves around the question of which “type” the author gravitated toward—in other words, what was the measure of her intimacy with or distance from the forces represented by, respectively, her mother and her father. What Glasgow's self-analyses tend to leave out of account, however, are elements in herself that for whatever reason she wanted to deny or suppress and, beyond this, her double-edged relationship with the related inheritances of her family and her region. This is not simply a matter of something pointed out by Glasgow's biographers: that, while Glasgow claimed she “inherited nothing” from her father “except the color of my eyes and a share in a trust fund,” she in fact showed the same determination to succeed, the same “vein of iron” and pursuit of authority (in this case, the authority of authorship) that she deprecated in him. Nor is it simply the case that on something like, say, the issue of her Southernness she would contradict herself: wanting to be “universal” rather than “provincial,” she nevertheless (as we shall see) constantly situated and defined herself in regional as well as local terms. It is more than that. Glasgow was born into related crises of family and locality; she was the inheritor of a deeply conflicted literary tradition; and, as a female member of an upper-middle-class family, she was to face most of her life a peculiar—but, of course, by no means unusual—mixture of disadvantage and privilege. Ellen Glasgow sensed most of this and acutely analyzed some of it: but she was no more complete in her understanding of herself than anyone else. Her fiction is a compelling hybrid, because it not only diagnoses historical tensions but also because it offers symptoms of those tensions too; it tells us, better than even Glasgow herself knew, what it was like to live in a place of difficulty at a time of change.

Just five years before Glasgow was born, a British visitor observed of Richmond that “the devastating effects of war” were “still to be traced, not only on the houses and buildings, but on that which is of infinitely more importance—the minds of men.” Other visitors agreed. Those of a more melodramatic turn of mind and more sweeping habits of language referred to “a dead civilisation and a broken-down system” or claimed to have seen “enough woe and want and ruin and ravage to satisfy the most insatiate heart,” “enough of sore humiliation and bitter overthrow to appease the desire of the most vengeful spirit.” Others preferred the moving anecdote, the telling detail. “I heard of one gentleman,” declared a traveler who visited Virginia just after the Civil War, “who before the war had been unable to spend the whole of his large income, being now a porter in a dry goods store; and of another, who formerly had possessed everything which riches could supply, dying in such penury that his family had to beg of their friends contributions for his funeral.”³ Whatever the size of the canvas, however, contemporary observers painted a bleak picture of a town in which “there was hardly a house which had not suffered more or less.” With the decline of the old plantation and the old elites, however, came the rise of the new: people who, with the help of outside capital, began to transform the economic and social structures of the state. By 1880, investment was flowing into Virginia: “often welcomed,” as one historian has put it, “with open arms and loud hosannahs” by “impecunious local citizens.” Millions were poured into the coal mines of southwest Virginia; the trains of the Norfolk and Western Railroad carried the coal to the growing port of Norfolk; and northern capital both extended the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad to the town of Newport News and enabled the building of coal and freight piers there. One telling symptom of the change from rural to urban was a change of name: the small town of Big Lick had ambitions to be a big town, and its civic leaders demonstrated their seriousness by renaming their home place Roanoke. Very quickly—in fact, within the space of five or six years—Roanoke became the state's newest metropolis. This change from a rustic title to something with more aristocratic and imposing connotations was an accompaniment of growth, of course, rather than a cause of it. But it was and is something else as well: which is to say, an illustration of how, in the postbellum South, the New and Old frequently found a means of accommodation. Virginians who benefited from the changed conditions, like Southerners generally, lost no time once they had acquired wealth in adopting the trappings of aristocratic privilege: a big house, preferably with columns, an estate, good china, silverware suitably engraved with perhaps a coat of arms, and servants. A planter from the antebellum era could, and sometimes did, make money too and then use that money to resurrect past glory: perhaps to buy back, perhaps to restore or replicate the land and with it the status he had lost. Not only that, after the “Bourbon” reaction, nouveaux riches and the old rich newly restored to good fortune could and certainly did secure power by an adept use of the patriarchal image: it was so much easier to elect a man, after all, if he possessed a name redolent of times past, had the air of feudal privilege, and called himself “Colonel.” In short, new money might be transforming the material bases of Virginian and Southern society; but—especially after the era of Reconstruction, when Republicans were driven back north and the former slaves were driven back down—the old order kept its grip on the imagination of state and region. Glasgow was born into a situation in which style frequently acted as a mask for substance: where, in effect, the material and verbal economies were in direct conflict.

The situation was further complicated by the peculiar position of Richmond in all this. Certainly, Richmond participated in the economic growth of the state to an extent. There were men like Francis Thomas Glasgow—who had, it should be said, inherited the iron works over which he presided—ready to seize opportunity and to demonstrate what his daughter called “iron will” in the process. But that participation could hardly conceal and scarcely mitigated the fact of long-term decline. The once-great Confederate capital, its commerce eroded by the railroad and by the large ships that could not navigate the James River, was becoming a shrine. In Hollywood Cemetery, not that far from the Glasgow home, citizens unveiled a statue of the Confederate war hero General J. E. B. Stuart that seemed to say it all: “Dead, yet Alive,” the inscription read, “Mortal, yet Immortal.” It was one of Glasgow's aims as a novelist, she said, “to interpret … the prolonged effects of the social transition” of the Civil War and its aftermath “upon ordinary lives,” which was a difficult enough task in itself. The task was rendered all the more difficult, however, by her local situation. The hard facts of postbellum Virginian and Southern culture were more at odds with the mythology that it used to explain and defend itself than they are in most cultures: more at odds than they have been, even, at other times in the history of state and region. That was one thing. But to this was added the problem of Richmond: a place that had been not just a center but the center of the Confederacy, now reduced to being a sideshow in the big show of regional revival, and compelled as a result to resurrect and rename its ghosts. James Branch Cabell, another novelist living in postbellum Richmond, claimed to have known Glasgow “more thoroughly and more comprehendingly … than did any other human being during the last twenty years of her living”; he also claimed that he gave Glasgow the idea that her novels, taken together, offered “a portrayal of all social and economic Virginia since the War between the States.” Both claims are arguable. What Cabell could have claimed with justice, however, is that he knew intimately the masks with which both he and Ellen Glasgow were confronted in their hometown. On public occasions, Cabell said, the inhabitants of the town spoke of “a paradise in which they had lived once upon a time, and in which there had been no imperfection, but only beauty and chivalry and contentment.” Even for a child, however, this posed difficulties: “because,” as Cabell put it, “you lived in Richmond; and Richmond was not like Camelot. Richmond was a modern city, with sidewalks and plumbing and gas light and horse cars. … Damsels in green kirtles and fire-breathing dragons and champions in bright armour did not go up and down the streets of Richmond, but only some hacks and surreys, and oxcarts hauling tobacco.”⁴ Even more than in most places in the state, Cabell said and Glasgow sensed, people were “creating … in the same instant that they lamented the Old South's extinction, an Old South which had died proudly at Appomattox without ever having been smirched by the wear and tear of existence.” So if Glasgow became more interested even than most other Southern writers in people (as she herself put it) “unaware of the changes about them, clinging with passionate fidelity to the empty ceremonial forms of tradition,” it is hardly surprising. Those forms, and the conflicts they generated, were felt everywhere in postwar Virginia and the South: but they were felt with an intensity unusual even in that state and region on the streets where she and Cabell lived.

Something else that Glasgow experienced with peculiar intensity was her own version of the Southern family romance. Glasgow tried to resolve the warring tendencies that were present in her family as much as they were in her region by claiming that, as a novelist, she had finally achieved a cunning synthesis. “I was never a pure romancer any more than I was a pure realist,” she declared. She was, rather, a “verist” who recognized that “the whole truth must embrace the interior world as well as external appearances.” The claim was one way of signifying that she had come to terms with the law of the father by reconciling it with the shadowy imperatives of the lost figure of the mother. On a more strictly material level, it was also a way of suggesting that she had resolved the problem of a “realistic” New South cloaking itself in the “romantic” splendors of the Old South by taking and resolving the best of what New and Old had to offer. Looking in detail at what Glasgow actually did in her novels and said in her nonfictional prose, however, what emerges is not so much resolution as contradiction. The law of the father is simultaneously resisted and embraced, the maternal presence is quietly mocked but also adored; the one constant is a sense of the utter difficulty, in fact the impossibility, of reconciliation, synthesis—or, in simple, human terms a constant relationship, a stable family, a happy marriage. In Life and Gabriella, for example, subtitled “The Story of a Woman's Courage,” the proto-feminist heroine is eventually swept off her feet by a conventionally virile man. “I'll come with you now—anywhere—toward the future,” Gabriella breathlessly declares at the end of the novel. After years of struggle—in which, we are advised, Gabriella Carr has passed from “The Age of Faith” to “The Age of Knowledge”—the woman who was evidently meant to embody (to use Glasgow's own words) “a revolt from the pretence of being … a struggle for the liberation of personality” consigns herself and her fate into the hands of a man “able to command her respect by the sheer force of his character.” “He was rough, off-hand, careless,” Gabriella reflects shortly before surrendering to him, “she could imagine that he might become almost brutal if he were crossed in his purpose.”⁵ He is, in fact, a man not unlike Francis Thomas Glasgow; and, in this moment of capitulation, what Glasgow once called “womanhood so free, so active, so conquering” seems to be yielding to male authority in a double sense. Not only the heroine seems to be conceding the truer, stronger “vein of iron” to patriarchal authority, in short; Glasgow—the woman, the daughter, and the novelist—seems to be as well.

“A little too much has been made … of Ellen Glasgow's revolt against the lofty traditions of the Old South,” James Branch Cabell argued, adding that Glasgow “has fallen in with that formalized and amiably luxurious manner of living to which, virtually, she was born.”⁶ On the personal level, Glasgow might have poured scorn on the “feminine ideal” that her own mother embodied—“the belief,” for instance, “that the worship of a dissolute husband is an exalted occupation for an immortal soul.” But that scorn did not prevent her from worshiping her mother and modeling her own life on hers. As her biographers have pointed out, even the little touches were telling here: she wore more than the usual amount of makeup to emphasize her femininity, she entertained after the fashion and tradition of the good Southern hostess, when she died her room turned out to be arranged exactly like her mother's. The man with whom she had the deepest, most enduring relationship during her adult life was of the firm opinion that, as he put it, “women are happier where the dominance of the man in the relationship is recognized,” a creed that clearly informed the life of Glasgow's father and mother—to the obvious advantage of one and disadvantage of the other—and one that Glasgow was evidently willing to go along with some of the time. On the level of the fiction, in turn, there is the evidence of the novel in which the presence of Glasgow's mother is most clearly felt, Virginia, published three years before Life and Gabriella, in 1913. Virginia was intended, Glasgow said, as a “candid portrait of a lady” of a kind that had by then become “almost as extinct as the dodo.” More needs to be said later about this account of a heroine who conforms to “the feminine ideal of the ages,” and who clearly recalls for her creator the worn, self-denying figure of Anne Glasgow. For the moment, it is simply worth pointing out that the novel has a history reflecting Glasgow's own profound uncertainty about the central character and all she represents in terms of “the old feudal order” and its “consecrated doctrine” of female purity and passivity. Glasgow initially intended, she later admitted, to deal ironically with the Southern lady, but as she went on she discovered that her “irony grew fainter, while it yielded to sympathetic compassion.” Her preliminary notes for Virginia, in fact, reveal that the book began as a contrast between a fading Southern belle and a rising industrialist—a contrast encapsulating “the transition from an aristocracy to a commercial civilization.” It then, in a second outline, focused on the effect of the “unselfishness” of the heroine on her husband's character. Finally, it became much more of a tragedy: a critical, yet fundamentally sympathetic and even admiring investigation of the pastoral idealism that shaped the character of the Southern lady. There is still irony in the final, published account of Virginia Pendleton: but there is, even more clearly, a quiet but by no means understated adoration of her stoic virtue—of what is called, toward the end of the narrative, her capacity “to suffer and to renounce with dignity, not with heroics.” “One comes to feel,” Louis D. Rubin has observed, “that it may well be the times, and not Virginia, that are out of joint,”⁷ a point underscored by any reading of Glasgow's preface to the novel, written years later, where she draws attention to the contrast it offers between the “pure selflessness” of her heroine and the ruthless “self-interest” of the world she inhabits. To this extent, Glasgow's feelings about her mother, and all she came to embody for her daughter, seem just as conflicted as her feelings about the authoritative, “more patriarchal than paternal” figure of her father. So, for that matter, do her feelings about the evolutionary pattern, the social and psychic upheavals registered in this particular version of the family romance.

“I could not separate Virginia from her background,” Glasgow declared of her heroine, “because she was an integral part of it, and it shared her validity.” Which brings us to another level of conflict: stemming from Glasgow's uncertain relationship with the literary history of state and region. At first sight, that relationship might seem fairly straightforward. After all, Glasgow herself famously declared that what the South needed was “blood and irony.” “Blood it needed,” she went on, “because southern culture had strained too far away from its roots in the earth; it had grown thin and pale; it was satisfied to exist on borrowed ideas, to copy instead of create. And irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.”⁸ Added to that, Glasgow made no secret of her belief that, if she herself was not providing all that the South needed in this direction, she was nevertheless making her own substantial contribution. She could be scathing about the literary tradition she had inherited. Before the Civil War, she suggested, a conspiracy had been at work in the region to suppress a genuine literature. The Southern church “was charitable toward almost every weakness except the dangerous practice of thinking”; the code of easy living, hospitality, and “generous manners exacted that the artist should be more gregarious than solitary”; and the closed society created by the slavery controversy discouraged free thought and vital habits of imagination. After the war, in turn, “pursued by the dark furies of Reconstruction, the mind of the South was afflicted with a bitter nostalgia. From this homesickness for the past there flowered, as luxuriantly as fireweed in burned places, a mournful literature of commemoration.”⁹ Hating this “attitude of evasive idealism” and “moribund convention,” Glasgow would, she insisted “revolt against the formal, the false, the affected, the sentimental, and the pretentious in Southern writing.”

Every writer has to erect a tradition of a kind against which to test their ideas and inspiration; and Glasgow was not deviating either from that necessity of invention—nor, for that matter, departing entirely from the literal facts of her literary inheritance. The trouble was and is that, although she was telling something of the truth here, she was not telling the whole truth. Even on her own terms, her relationship to the literary transformations she both anticipated and celebrated was more convoluted and problematical than she cared to admit. For one thing, while she might mock the “sentimental infirmity” of Southern novelists of the old school, she was just as disparaging about what she termed the “patriotic materialism” of those who sought to reject the sentimental tradition. She had no patience with the writers of the region who came immediately after her, or with what she called the “half-wits, and whole idiots, and nymphomaniacs, and paranoiacs, and rake-hells in general, that populate the modern literary South.”¹⁰ More to the point, perhaps, in attacking the “uniform concrete surface” of modern life and the “mediocrity” of “Americanism” that she felt the New South had embraced, she began to sound rather like someone suffering from a “sentimental infirmity” herself. “The Americanism so prevalent in the South today,” she complained, “belong[s] to that major variety which, by reducing life to a level of comfortable mediocrity, has contributed more than a name to the novel of protest”; it meant a “decrease in that art of living, which excels in the amiable aspects of charm”; and, without such arts, she felt, “a new class” rises “to the surface if not to the top.” “It is this menace,” Glasgow added, “not only to freedom of thought but to beauty and pleasure and picturesque living that is forcing the intelligence and the aesthetic emotions of the South into revolt.”¹¹ At moments such as this, it is difficult to disentangle Glasgow from the “evasive idealism” she elsewhere deprecated: “beauty and pleasure and picturesque living” is, quite clearly, a phrase any self-respecting plantation novelist would have been proud of, as they bathed their canvas in moonlight and magnolias. The story Glasgow told about the literary tradition of the South, and her relationship with it, did not fit together—or, if it did, it was not in the way she evidently intended. What it revealed was not a seamless progress, a personal odyssey from sentimental romance to stern realism, but something more confused and interesting: a habit of vacillation, with the author never really sure where, if anywhere, to take her stand.

That the story told more perhaps than the author had intended was one thing. That it was, in any event, just that, a story, was another. It does not take a great deal of ingenuity to see that, in her account of Southern writing and her place in it, Glasgow was turning material fact into myth: not denying the truth, exactly, but selecting, shaping, reorganizing so as to create an enabling fiction, a usable past. The contrast between a genteel, sentimental, but picturesque old style of literature and a new style notable for its vein of iron(y), its toughness and “patriotic materialism”—not to speak of its allegiance to the “uniform concrete surface” of things: that, after all, is largely the story of Tidewater mother and Scottish Calvinist father translated into aesthetic terms. The conflict Glasgow outlines in her brief literary history of the region is of a recognizable, personal kind; and so too is its major, intended narrative thrust—the tale of progress that she clearly intended it to tell. Some of the most interesting and persuasive readings of Glasgow's work have emphasized her debt to the evolutionary theories of contemporary science—it is not insignificant that in her first published novel, The Descendant, she compares her characters to atoms, invokes “the old savage type, beaten out by civilization,” and describes personal conflict with reference to biological necessity, class conflict, and social progress. True to a progressivist understanding of history—in this case, literary history—what Glasgow did, effectively, in her account of “the novel in the South” and her part in it was suppress those parts of the past and present that suggested continuity and foreground those that implied change. Like the hero in a naturalist novel, Glasgow the novelist, as Glasgow the essayist depicted her, was someone who built the new upon the ruins of the old: whose relationship with the past could be described mainly in terms of difference, struggle, and advancement. Glasgow was different, certainly, from the novelists of state and region who preceded her. She did struggle to inject blood and irony into her writing. And she did advance the boundaries of fiction as far as concerns some of the issues she confronted: most notably, there were the two issues that she herself recognized as central to her work—what she called “the rise of the workingman in the South” and what her friend and neighbor Cabell termed (when trying to summarize her writing) her “complete natural history of the Southern gentlewoman.”¹²

.....

… [T]here was a ready market for anything the “new southern woman” might produce. “The world will not hear our story,” a Georgia girl had complained in her diary just a few months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. She was thinking about the version of the South being disseminated in what she called the “horrid newspapers” of the “Yankees.” Within a short while, however, she had been proved wrong. The world did, evidently, want to hear the story of the South, particularly the Old South. Southerners wanted to hear it for a variety of reasons: ranging from affection for what seemed to be irretrievably dead and buried, to the belief that economic growth might engineer a resurrection. And a triumphant North was eager to hear that story too, in order to find out about the people they had defeated: perhaps wondering what had been lost or gained with victory, perhaps interested in what might have survived to be integrated into the new dispensation—or, more likely, both. The market was there, then, and so was the means of producing for that market. The Southern Literary Messenger closed down in 1864; and publishing virtually disappeared in the South. In the North, however, radically improved printing techniques resulted in the production of cheap books for a mass market; while the number of magazines increased sharply, from about two hundred in 1860 to over eighteen hundred in 1900. Most of the women who took advantage of the opportunity created by these revolutions in social and professional life, and in the marketplace, are now largely forgotten: only the most comprehensive of libraries is likely to contain once popular romances by, say, Frances Courtenay Baylor, Virginia Frazier Boyle, Constance Carey Harrison, or Amelie Rives. One such writer wrote stories of old times in the Old Dominion that sold in the hundreds of thousands in their day but is now remembered, if at all, mainly for her later, less successful attempts to deal with evolutionary, social, and philosophical issues: Mary Johnston, the daughter of a Confederate veteran and the niece of General Joseph E. Johnston, who was born in Virginia just three years before Glasgow.

Johnston published her first book, Prisoners of Hope, in 1898. It was apparently written to help out the family finances, which had suffered severely after the war. If this was indeed her aim, then she was eminently successful. Like the novel that almost immediately followed it, To Have and to Hold, it was a best-seller, achieving sales in five figures; the proceeds from the two books together enabled Johnston to travel widely before returning to Virginia—and, for a while, to Richmond. The critic Lawrence Nelson has suggested that there was a kind of “civil war” in Johnston, “between the countrywoman and the cosmopolite, the woman and the feminist, the Virginian and the Universalist”; and Anne Goodwyn Jones agrees, emphasizing the way Johnston was torn between “the visionary sense of a perfectible future” and “the tragic sense of a limited past.” Johnston herself seems to have felt much the same. In 1905, for example, she wrote this in a letter to a friend: “The American is very like Hamlet's cloud and has as many shapes as the given returns of the last census. He has other haunts than those of Broadway. He dips his sop in the dish of all the philosophies, including his own. He will work out. He is not always blatant. See how patriotic I am! And yet—and yet—in spite of all reason and merely an ingrained and hereditary matter, Virginia (incidentally the entire South) is my country, and not the stars and stripes but the stars and bars is my flag.”¹³ The conflict wryly measured here, between the American and the Virginian or Southerner, runs in fact through all Johnston's work. In particular, there is a deep fissure, a split of opinion in Prisoners of Hope strikingly similar to the one running through Swallow Barn and The Virginia Comedians; it also produces a similar result—extraordinary narrative tensions, and plot convolutions the main aim of which seem to be to conceal that split and so get the author out of trouble. Johnston was to deal with the Civil War later, in Cease Firing and The Long Roll; this first novel is set (like To Have and to Hold) in colonial Virginia; nevertheless, there is “civil war” of a kind here too, as the author struggles to come to terms with divisions that are at once her own and a part of her place in history.

There is, certainly, an element of daring in Prisoners of Hope, suggesting that Johnston was at least initially willing to cast a cold, critical eye on the colonial gentry of Virginia. For the first time in Virginia fiction, an indentured servant, Godfrey Landless, is permitted the privilege of a major role in the action. Thanks in part to this, the rough dwelling places and the even rougher lives of slaves and indentured servants are given about equal time with the courtly splendor of the lives of the gentry. There are even plans for a slave revolt during the course of the book. Both the privileged and those whose labor enables such privilege are allowed a voice: at times, in effect, the characters seem to be not so much in contrast or conflict as in debate, as they rehearse the arguments for and against a feudal order. “We are a little bit of England set down here in the wilderness,” the aristocratic heroine of the novel, Patricia Verney, declares, “Why should we not clothe ourselves like gentlefolk as well as our kindred and our friends at home? And sure both England and Virginia have had enough of sad coloured raiment. Better go like a peacock than like a horrid Roundhead.”¹⁴ This clearly is the argument for the hierarchical social system of Old Virginia. Godfrey Landless, in turn, openly challenges that system. “Is it of choice, do you think,” he asks rhetorically, “that men lie rotting in prison, in the noisome holds of ships, are bought and sold like oxen, are chained to the oar, to the tobacco field, are herded with the refuse of the earth, are obedient to the finger, to the whip? … What allegiance did we owe to them who had cast us out, or to them who bought us as they buy dumb cattle? As God lives, none!”¹⁵ At moments like these, the characters appear to be competing for the sympathy of the reader; and Johnston herself is leaving her critical options open, permitting her own divisions of opinion something like free play.

Only something like free play, though: while Landless and other characters are allowed to interrogate a system that, in the words of one of them, leaves the worker “bowed and broken” before he or she is freed, that interrogation only goes so far. Landless, it turns out, is a gentleman who has had the misfortune to fall foul of the law. True, he is Puritan in his inclinations and, as such, opposed to the Cavaliers and their ladies who live off his labor. But he is not a zealot, like most of the other Puritans given a voice in the novel—people like one Win-Grace Porringer, for instance, whose narrowness of mind and violence of language are clearly designed to alienate the reader's sympathy: “I, Win-Grace Porringer, testify against the people of this land: against Prelatists, and Papists, Presbyterians and Independents, Baptists, Quakers, and heathen … princes, governors, and men in high places. … Cursed by they all! Surely they shall be as Sodom and Gomorrah, even to the breeding of salt-pits and a perpetual damnation!”¹⁶ More to the point, the sense of the injustice of forced labor is not even extended to cover all indentured servants—let alone the slaves. Most of the indentured brought over from Newgate, together with the slave of African origin, are portrayed as little better than animals and easily led into violence by an evil mulatto called Luiz Sebastian. The potential slave revolt clearly poses a problem for Johnston, as far as her own division of loyalties is concerned. So she quickly deals with that problem by aborting the revolt and introducing a rebellion of African slaves in league with discontented local Indians led by Luiz Sebastian; in the face of this new threat from forces that are quite clearly “other,” beyond the boundaries of culture as far as the author is concerned, Cavalier and Puritan join in an alliance proposed by Landless, to defend the closed world of the old plantation. Admittedly, Johnston later flirts with danger again, by having Landless and Patricia Verney enjoy a brief idyll together in the woods after he has rescued her from Indian captivity. But it is no more than a flirtation. The liaison does not survive the brief respite from the pressures of history and social status provided by the forest: the novel ends with Cavalier lady restored to the comforts of her aristocratic home and culture, while Landless is left alone in the wilderness, presumably to die. By a series of maneuvers that seem simultaneously desperate and cunning, Johnston separates the gentlemen victims from those victims who have the misfortune to come from another class or race. She then ensures that Landless, who is the hero of Prisoners of Hope to the extent that he dominates both action and love plots, does not receive the usual due of the hero—recognition, status, the hand of the lady—because, quite simply, he carries too much baggage with him, too much in the way of dubious social status. It is a familiar pattern by now in Virginia fiction. The forces that threaten to disrupt the narrative, by calling into question the legitimacy of the old order, are eventually excluded: banished from the narrative and consigned to the wilderness of the “other”—that which can exist only outside the boundaries of culture. After resisting, for a while, the undertow of feeling that draws her toward the social system of the gentry, the author ends by surrendering to it; this “civil war” ends, not in compromise or resolution, but in what is more or less a victory for the “ingrained and hereditary” attachments of a Virginia lady.

Just seven years after Prisoners of Hope was published, Mary Johnston wrote in her diary, “Ellen and I talked books; Webster, Ford, Congreve, Swift, Steele, and Addison, Chapman's Homer, Dickens etc.” She and Glasgow were, in fact, part of a network of mutual support among women writers that also included, at various times, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The bond between Glasgow and Johnston was particularly close. “I want you to know and feel how my love goes out to you,” Glasgow wrote to Johnston. “It always seems to me that I should like to take you in my arms and shield you.” In turn Johnston wrote to Glasgow, “I dreamed of you the other night. I was in a house over against your house … and I looked out of my window across to your window.”¹⁷ Glasgow liked to call Johnston “my fellow craftsman.” “I feel that I should be as glad as possible to know you better,” she wrote to her early on in their friendship. “Yes, I daresay we are different in many ways,” she went on, “—it will be interesting, don't you think, to learn how different. And the main thing, perhaps we both have.” A year after writing this, Glasgow was to make the point about the differences and yet fundamental connection between them by citing a Buddhist proverb: “There are many paths down into the valley, but when we come out upon the mountains we all see the self-same sun.” Perhaps the most immediate and pressing element in this communality of feeling was the shared sense of the simple need for such communality among women. “It is seldom in modern fiction that a friendship between two women … has assumed a prominent place,”¹⁸ Glasgow lamented in one of her essays: something she surely felt she had particular cause to lament because she herself had both felt the urgency and experienced the value of such friendship. “Women are coming to understand their interdependence,” she declared in the same essay: an interdependence she knew, in particular, with Johnston in the earlier part of her career and, some time later, with a younger writer from Florida, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. What Glasgow and Johnston had in common went beyond this, however, beyond even their shared interest in women's rights and female suffrage. They were women from the wealthier levels of Virginia society. They were both writing at a time that was unusually encouraging as far as opportunities for white women in the South were concerned. They were, however, both also writing at a time that offered peculiar challenges to people from precisely their place in Southern society. So it is hardly surprising that, despite the differences Glasgow acknowledged, there was a lot that contributed to their sense of a common pursuit or project. There is a confluence of aims here, as well as shared tensions and irresolutions; here, in fact, even more than in the ties that bind her to [John Pendleton] Kennedy and [John Esten] Cooke, Glasgow betrays her connection to the matter of Virginia—and, beyond that, to the story of the South.

The ties that bind Glasgow's work to the work of other writers from Virginia, and particularly other women writers like Johnston, are perhaps at their most obvious in a book like The Battle-Ground, published four years after Prisoners of Hope. Glasgow carefully researched this novel, making her way through the files of Richmond newspapers during the war years and visiting old battle sites. She also claimed later that she had tried in this book “to portray the last stand in Virginia of the aristocratic tradition” in a necessarily critical spirit: to expose the lie of “men who embraced a cause as fervently as they would embrace a woman, men in whom the love of an abstract principle became, not a religion, but a romantic passion.” The febrile intensity of the phrasing here, however, suggests the problem. Glasgow was more than half in love with the “romantic passion” that, she claimed, she set out to interrogate; and, in the process of interrogation, she was in any case hampered by her use of fictional forms that drew her toward the romance of the old plantation—and to the elegies penned to the fall of the South in the Civil War. Certainly, there is what George Dekker, in a subtle analysis of the book, has called “a subversive agenda” at work here at times: notably in such things as the portrait of the choleric Major Lightfoot (“Without slavery, where is our aristocracy, sir?”), and in Glasgow's account of the absurdly romantic notions that the young hero Dan Mountjoy and the woman he loves, Betty Ambler, have of warfare—and that Dan carries with him to the battlefield. One of the most striking and effective aspects of The Battle-Ground is, in fact, Glasgow's critical use of intertextuality. With Dan away at the war front, for instance, Betty pores over his favorite books in fond commemoration of him: “Among them was a copy of the ‘Morte d'Arthur,’ and as it fell open in her hand, she found a bit of her own blue ribbon between the faded leaves. … Behind her in the dim room Dan seemed to rise as suddenly as a ghost—and that high-flown chivalry of his, which delighted in sounding phrases as in heroic virtues, was loosened from the leaves of the old romance.”¹⁹ What Major Lightfoot calls “a taste for trash” is clearly being used to illuminate the South's retreat into unreality: a retreat that Dan himself comes to take the measure of when he encounters the grim reality of battle—as Glasgow knew, and indicates in the sometimes gruesome detail of her descriptions, some of the bloodiest fighting of the war took place in Virginia. The strategy of using text to comment on historical context is further developed as Glasgow describes how “a garbled version of ‘Les Miserables’ passed from regiment to regiment” in the Army of Northern Virginia: the irony of one of the great stories of revolutionary democracy becoming the staple reading matter of soldiers fighting to protect hierarchy and privilege is not lost, on either the author or the reader. The irony has been prepared for, in fact, by another episode of reading. Dan forms a close companionship with Pinetop, a huge mountaineer who, although not a slave owner, will defend Virginia. He is shocked to discover Pinetop one day studying his primer and struggling to decipher the word “rat.” “For the first time in his life,” we are told, Dan,

was brought face to face with the tragedy of hopeless ignorance for an inquiring mind. … Until knowing Pinetop he had, in the lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved—a society produced by that free labour which had degraded the white workman to the level of a serf. … To men like Pinetop, slavery, stern or mild, could be but an equal menace, and yet these were the men who, when Virginia called, came from their little cabins in the mountains … and fought uncomplainingly until the end.²⁰

At moments such as these, Glasgow deftly uses the trope of reading to launch a critique, not only of Southern romanticism (the kind of romanticism, that is, that led Mark Twain to blame Sir Walter Scott for the Civil War), but of the injustices visited on both black and white by slavery. Clearly, she has more than just one kind of false consciousness in her sights.

But if there is an element of false consciousness present in Pinetop's willingness to fight for a system that has menaced him, and reduced him to semiliteracy, there is also—as Glasgow presents him—a measure of heroism, however absurd. “At the call to arms,” the narrator intones, Pinetop “had come, with long strides, down from his bare little cabin in the Blue Ridge, bringing with him a flintlock musket, a corncob pipe, and a stockingful of Virginia tobacco.” The homely touches, the reminders of his local habitation, meld with the stress—here and elsewhere in the narrative—on his folkloric hugeness of stature. Pinetop is seen as a simple giant, whose alignment with the Southern cause may be—from a commonsensical, rational point of view—naïve and illogical, even directly contrary to his own economic interests, but also seems—in its own humble way—bold, greathearted, and courageous, a function of his instinctively local loyalties. Not for the first or last time in a Southern narrative, what makes a character appear slightly absurd also makes him seem admirable: the heroism, such as it is, springs precisely from his simple refusal to act in his own best practical interests. This sympathy that Glasgow betrays for someone she may also be gently satirizing recurs in her portrait of many of the gentry. Governor Peyton Ambler “looking complacently over the fat lands upon which his fathers had sown and harvested for generations”²¹ seems as comically self-satisfied but also as endearing and even estimable as Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones—or, for that matter, Frank Meriwether in Swallow Barn. And Dan Mountjoy, riding his horse Prince Rupert like “a cavalier fresh from the service of his lady or his king,” appears as careless and reckless as any young plantation Hotspur out of antebellum romance—and, in his way, just as thrilling. When Glasgow uses intertextuality in this book, the usual result is critical, interrogative: the reader measures the mistake the character is making in terms of the gap between what that character is and what he or she is reading. But there is another kind of intertextuality here, which is a matter not so much of use as of being used: the romance of Virginia and the South steers Glasgow toward a gently idyllic portrait of old times and their unfortunate fall, almost despite herself.

Which is all by way of saying that there is rather too much romance of the old plantation in The Battle-Ground for it to be as critical of Southern traditions, and the “evasive idealism” of the Virginia gentry, as Glasgow evidently intended. At the core of the novel, for instance, is a familiar strategy of Southern romance: the juxtaposition of two Southern families, the one headed by the courtly Governor Peyton Ambler and the other by the “kindly rollicking” Major Lightfoot, enabling the author to separate out the different strands—of genteel aristocrat and bluff country squire—that went to make up the image of the gentry, and to make them seem less contradictory. Governor Ambler is “a bland and generous gentleman,” with “a classic face”: upright, clear-sighted, he is rational enough to realize the dangers of secession—in fact, the narrator tells us, “he fought hard against” it—but “when it rushed on in spite of him, he knew where his duty guided him, and he followed it, as always, like a pleasure.”²² If he corresponds to the figure of the Virginia Cavalier that crops up repeatedly in apologias for the South, then Major Lightfoot is closer to the prototype of the Kentucky Colonel. Irascible, stubborn, but also generous and warmhearted, Lightfoot is presented with more of a critical edge than the Governor is: his grandson, Dan, for instance sees him as “a braggart and a bully” and leaves home after quarreling with him, not long before the outbreak of war. However, the fact that Glasgow gives her two families names that recollect the attributes of different kinds of horses is not accidental: the Major, like the Governor, has breeding—signaled, not least, by the “Roman nose” he has inherited from his wellborn English ancestors. His irascibility is inseparable from his courage and daring: like his grandson, he is “a dare-devil” who “in his day … matched any man in Virginia at cards or wine or women—to say nothing of horseflesh.” In short, he is as much of a romantic figure as his equally aristocratic neighbor is: almost a Byronic hero grown older, who invariably proves he has the right stuff in a crisis. The first time his grandson sees him after a separation of twelve years is when the Major is lying dead on the battlefield: “now he [Dan] knew that at least he was not craven,” the narrator tells us “—that he could take blows as he dealt them.”

Set against these gently burnished emblems of the aristocratic male are appropriate types of female virtue. The “frail and gentle” wife of Governor Ambler with a profile like “delicate porcelain”—whose delicacy of appearance belies the fact that “of all the souls on the great plantation” she “alone had never rested from her labours”²³—is a typical plantation dame or mistress. Her daughters Betty and Virginia—as much a part of the traditions of the state as their names imply—are the familiar pairing of Southern belles, the one small, energetic, voluble, and lively and the other tall, graceful, and quiet. The contrast between the two young women may eventually be drawn from Shakespearean comedy (one thinks, for instance, of similar pairings of types of aristocratic female virtue in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night): but the more immediate debt is to the South's own version of the pastoral, which renamed the conventional figures of Elizabethan idyll and relocated Arcadia below the Mason and Dixon line. As for the characters who are not fortunate enough to be of the gentry and/or white, they are left to hover on the margins of the story. Pinetop, for all the recognition of his oppression, is little more than a sentimental stereotype of rural virtue: he sobs as he recalls kissing the mane of Old Traveller, General Lee's horse, in childlike farewell to the patriarch of the Confederacy after the War. The future in this novel belongs, not to him, but to the reformed aristocrats, Dan and Betty, whom we leave at the end of the novel about to begin again—building the new upon the ruins of the old. The black characters, in turn, are given even shorter shrift; they earn absolutely no place in the narrative beyond the conventional. Typical here is a slave called Big Abel who accompanies his master, Dan Mountjoy, to battle and carries him wounded from the battlefield. After the war, he insists on continuing to labor for Dan on the old plantation—“Let yo' darky do a bit of work if he wants to,” he declares. Glasgow clearly saw slavery as a transgression of natural law, just as she sensed the anomaly of poor white folk fighting to preserve their own oppression. But she could, apparently, no more incorporate African Americans within the human terms of her story than she could translate her occasional perceptions of poor white deprivation into a sustained, critical analysis of the old order and a coherent program for the new. In this novel, black and poor white are as steadily excluded from social and narrative economies as they are in earlier tales of Virginia; they remain, in effect, irredeemably “other.”

Notes

1. The Woman Within (New York, 1954), 16. See also 85, 87; “The Dynamic Past,” The Reviewer (15 March 1921), 73-80; The Letters of Ellen Glasgow edited by Blair Rouse (New York, 1958), 116 (To Daniel Longwell [Spring 1932]), 257 (To Van Wyck Brooks, 4 October 1939), 329 (To Signe Toksvig, 14 August 1945); A Certain Measure: An Interpretation of Prose Fiction (New York, 1943), 90.

2. Woman Within, 16. See also Letters of Ellen Glasgow, 329 (To Signe Toksvig, 14 August 1945). On the biography of Glasgow, and in particular her relationship with her father, see Marjorie R. Kaufman, “Ellen Glasgow,” in Notable American Women edited by Edward T. James, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), I; E. Stanley Godbold Jr., Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within (New York, 1972); Monique P. Frazee, “Ellen Glasgow as Feminist,” in Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays edited by M. Thomas Inge (Charlottesville, Va., 1976); Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1835-1936 (Baton Rouge, La., 1981); Marcelle Thiébaux, Ellen Glasgow (New York, 1982). Many of these commentators also discuss the issue of how Glasgow's relationship to one or other or both of her parents affected her work. This is, of course, related to the question of the degree of ironic control that Glasgow achieved over her material. For two powerful arguments in favour of such control, see C. Hugh Holman, Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe (Athens, Ga., 1966), and Julius Rowan Raper, From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916-1945 (Baton Rouge, La., 1980). For two equally powerful arguments against, see Louis D. Rubin, No Place on Earth: Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell, and Richmond-in-Virginia (Austin, Texas, 1959), and Daniel J. Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982). The phrase “vein of iron” is used with approval in more than half of Glasgow's novels, and of course supplies the title of the novel she published in 1935; it was also—as, for example, Thiébaux points out (Ellen Glasgow, 12)—a quality she attributed to her Calvinist father.

3. Foster B. Zincke, Last Winter in the United States (London, 1868), 97. See also George Rose, The Great Country; or, Impressions of America (London, 1868), 147; Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas (Boston, 1866), 1; Edward King, The Southern States of North America (London, 1875), 451; Sir John Henry Kennaway, On Sherman's Track; or, The South After the War (London, 1867), 178-79; Virginius Dabney, Virginia, the New Dominion (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), 405, 406. On the developments sketched here, see Comer Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951), vol. XI of A History of the South, edited by Wendell Holmes Stephenson and E. Merton Coulter, 13 vols. (1947-95); J. S. Ezell, The South Since 1865 (New York, 1963); Thomas D. Clark and Henry W. Grady, The South Since Appomatox (New York, 1967). For discussions of some of the issues raised here, see Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970); Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914 (Baltimore, Md., 1972); Lucinda H. MacKethan, The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, La., 1980); Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1919 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980).

4. James Branch Cabell, “Almost Touching the Confederacy,” in Let Me Lie: Being in the Main an Ethnological Account of the Remarkable Commonwealth of Virginia and the Making of Its History (New York, 1947), 145, 147, 148-49, 153-54. See also As I Remember It: Some Epilogues in Recollection (New York, 1955), 217; review in Nation, CXX (May 6, 1925), 521; Woman Within, 193; Certain Measure, 29; David R. Goldfield, “The City as Southern History: The Past and the Promise of Tomorrow,” in The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Joe P. Dunn and Howard L. Preston (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 23. There has been extensive discussion of whether Cabell, as he claimed, gave Glasgow the idea of using her novels to present a recent social history of Virginia or whether this was Glasgow's intention at the outset of her career: see Certain Measure, 4; Cabell, “Speaks with Candor of a Great Lady,” in As I Remember It, 217-33; Daniel W. Patterson, “Ellen Glasgow's Plan for a Social History of Virginia,” Modern Fiction Studies, V (Winter 1959-60), 353-60; Oliver L. Steele, “Ellen Glasgow, Social History, and the ‘Virginia Edition,’” Modern Fiction Studies, VII (Summer 1961), 173-76; Howard Mumford Jones, “The Earliest Novels,” Ellen Glasgow, edited by Inge, 67-68; Barbro Ekman, The End of a Legend: Ellen Glasgow's History of Southern Women (Uppsala, 1971), 9-13.

5. Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's Courage (New York, 1916), 468. See also 480, 529; Certain Measure, 27-28; Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 235.

6. Cabell, “Miss Glasgow of Virginia,” Let Me Lie, 250. See also Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 234-5. The man with whom Glasgow had the most enduring relationship during her adult years was Henry W. Anderson. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings interviewed Anderson in 1953 as part of a plan for a biography of Glasgow. This and other interviews conducted by her have been published in E. E. MacDonald, “A Retrospective: Henry Anderson and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,” Ellen Glasgow Newsletter, XII (March 1980), 4-16.

7. Rubin, No Place on Earth, 24. See also Certain Measure, 77, 78, 79; Oliver Steele, “Ellen Glasgow's Virginia: Preliminary Notes,” Studies in Bibliography, XXVII (1974), 265-89; Notebook no. 2, Ellen Glasgow Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

8. Certain Measure, 28. See also 82.

9. Ibid., 138. See also 136, 137, 139.

10. Ibid., 69. See also 139, 144.

11. Ibid., 148. See also 145, 147.

12. Woman Within, 180-81; James Branch Cabell, “Two Sides of the Shielded,” New York Herald-Tribune Books (April 20, 1930), sec. 11, 6. See also The Descendant (New York, 1897), 77. For a persuasive account of the impact of evolutionary thought on Glasgow's work, see Julius Rowan Raper, Without Shelter: The Early Career of Ellen Glasgow (Baton Rouge, La., 1971). For accounts that develop Cabell's summary description of Glasgow's work, see Ekman, End of a Legend, and Elizabeth Jane Harrison, Female Pastoral: Women Writers Re-Visioning the American South (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991), 17-42.

13. Mary Johnston to Otto Kyllman, 1 February 1905, in Mary Johnston Papers (5967), Alderman Library, University of Virginia. See also Lawrence G. Nelson, “Mary Johnston and the Historic Imagination,” in Southern Writers: Appraisals in Our Time edited by R. C. Simonini Jr. (Charlottesville, Va., 1964), 76, 89-90, 101; Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 186. For other useful discussions of Johnston, see Edward C. Wagenknecht, “The World and Mary Johnston,” Sewanee Review, XLIV (Spring 1936); “Mary Johnston,” in Notable American Women edited by James; Watson, Cavalier in Virginia Fiction, 197-212.

14. Mary Johnston, Prisoners of Hope: A Tale of Colonial Virginia (1898; London, 1899 edition), 3. See also Jay B. Hubbell, “Cavalier and Indentured Servant in Virginia Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly, XXVI (1927), 35-36.

15. Johnston, Prisoners of Hope, 312.

16. Ibid., 55.

17. Mary Johnston to Ellen Glasgow, 27 September 1929, in Glasgow Papers (5060). See also Mary Johnston's Diary, in Johnston Papers (3588); Ellen Glasgow to Mary Johnston, Thursday [January 1905], in Johnston Papers; Ellen Glasgow to Mary Johnston, 22 March 1904, in Johnston Papers.

18. Certain Measure, 245.

19. The Battle-Ground (New York, 1902), 335-36. See also 98, 198; Certain Measure, 13; George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge, 1987), 290; Thiébaux, Ellen Glasgow, 48.

20. Battle-Ground, 442-43. See also 445; Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York, 1961 edition), 266.

21. The Battle-Ground, 45. See also 136-37. For a very different reading of this novel, see Harrison, Female Pastoral, 17-19.

22. Battle-Ground, 427. See also 16, 20, 41, 80, 376.

23. Ibid., 25. See also 23, 69. Analysis of the typology of the Southern family and plantation has a long and honorable history. Among notable analyses of this typology are Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and Accuracy of a Tradition (New York, 1924); William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961); Michael Kreyling, Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (Baton Rouge, La., 1986); Robert O. Stephens, The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies (Baton Rouge, La., 1995). Diane Roberts also has some extremely pertinent points to make about the stereotyping of women in Southern narratives in Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens, Ga., 1994) and The Myth of Aunt Jemima (London, 1995). Also relevant here are Judith R. Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York, 1978); Minrose Gwin, Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (Knoxville, Tenn., 1985); Kathryn Lee Seidel, The Southern Belle in the American Novel (Tampa, Fla., 1985); Slavery and the Literary Imagination edited by Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore, Md., 1989).