SOURCE: “Wright Morris's Plains Song: Woman's Search for Harmony,” in South Dakota Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Autumn, 1982, pp. 50-62.

Perhaps smarting a little under the criticism that his books rarely center around women, Wright Morris, in his recent novel, Plains Song, may be trying to correct the imbalance. His title page indicates that the “song” he is presenting is “for Female Voices.”¹ And indeed it is. The two principal voices are those of Cora Atkins and Sharon Rose Atkins, a niece Cora reared as her own. The first third of the book is given to Cora, the second two-thirds to Sharon, though both figure prominently in the whole book.

Plains Song opens with an introduction to the dying Cora, then jumps back to the story of her courtship and marriage in the early part of this century. From there the novel proceeds chronologically through her life and the lives of succeeding generations of the Atkins family. As a tall, flat, able young woman she gratefully married the stoical Emerson Atkins after a short acquaintance and the two began farming the Nebraska prairie. Sharing their farm and labors was Emerson's brother, Orion, a wilder sort, but more appealing than Emerson. When Orion's wife, Belle, died in childbirth, it was left to Cora to provide a home for Belle's two living children, Sharon Rose and Fayrene.

The book's opening sentence establishes two things—the subject of the book and the narrative attitude the book intends toward that subject. It announces: “It is a curse in this family that the women bear only daughters, if anything at all” (p. 1). Plains Song is mainly about women and about the fact that in three generations only female children have been born into the Atkins family. That such is considered “a curse” defines an attitude of a time and place toward the relative value of men and women and the nature of their roles and relationships. The essence of this attitude is not only that men are superior, but also that men and women are radically different and have clearly defined, God-ordained roles which are inflexible and binding. John W. Aldridge comments on the causes and consequences of this role distinction. He says this of frontier life:

[It] demanded so much that whole vital areas of the psychic life … had to be repressed, and the need for repression became the basis for a religion of self-sacrifice, endurance, parsimony, and rectitude, a religion trumped up by pioneer expediency in the name of moral virtue. But since in the prairie world it was the men who conquered and the women who secured and maintained, a sexual split was created which became at last a permanent national schizophrenia.²

And perhaps there was some justification for establishing binding role definitions. Certainly, in a culture where women must work as hard as men and have little time to practice being “ladies,” customary social distinctions among men and women run the risk of being lost. The maintenance of them may require extra effort. Morris is writing in this book about the nature of those role definitions in plains life and the painful, isolating consequences of their imposition. Cora's story is one of tough-minded endurance, of loss of self in the sexual necessity of child conception, of perpetuation of a system she believed providence to have established. She is strong, she is adamant, she endures. Sharon's is the story of fearful, then determined, rejection of a system, of escape from dependent yet estranged relationships, and of a troubled return to what she had left. She is both strong and weak, decisive and vulnerable.

Morris develops his narrative around two key events which surface repeatedly throughout the novel. These events reveal the natures of the two women, set the tone for their lives, and finally merge in an ultimate clarification of Morris's theme. The first of these is alluded to in the opening description of the dying Cora. We are told that this “implacable” woman whose “eyes are open” though her mind is sealed, like a tomb” (p. 1), has “between the first and second knuckle” on her right hand “a scar blue as gun metal” (p. 2), a scar said to have resulted from the bite of a horse. We learn later, however, that the bite was self-inflicted on the night of her first sexual experience with her husband. For her, the experience was like “an operation without anesthesia” in which “horror exceeded horror.” Her husband was perceived as “her assailant” doing “what must be done.” The morning light revealed that in her shock “she had bitten through the flesh of her hand, exposing the bone” (p. 14).

The second key event occurs some years later. Upon returning from Lincoln where she had gone to enroll at the university, Sharon finds that she is an unwanted third party in the life of Beulah Madge, Cora's oldest daughter and Sharon's childhood friend. Sharon angrily leaves Madge and Ned Kibbee spooning in the buggy and stalks into the house screaming, “Is he looking for a wife or a housemaid?” Cora, who hears her from the screened-in porch where she is ironing, follows her in, grabs her wrist, and whacks the palms of her hands with a hairbrush, crying, “That will teach you” but knowing in her heart that it would not. Cora knows, in fact, that “Sharon Rose meant it even worse than she said it” (pp. 75-76). These passages reveal, of course, the basic conflict between Cora and Sharon, between the woman who is handed her role and then grittily chooses it too and the woman who refuses to accept the role and pities the one who does. And between their defiance, one the defiance of acceptance, the other the defiance of rejection, is Madge who accepts her woman's role because she likes it, who represses troubling questions and lolls through marriage like a fat, contented cow.

The implications behind the two events reverberate through the book as the question of sexual roles is raised in each succeeding generation. Emerson is a stranger to Cora in their sexual union, and he remains so all their lives. In a system that defines roles so strictly, that allows no crossing over, the differences between men and women are stressed to the point that sex is their only meeting ground. In all else, each has his and her place, and the distance between them is not only maintained but widened. Cora and Emerson are very careful to establish territorial rights. She wants grass around the house and he concedes, “I guess it's your yard, but don't you ask me what you plan to do for horsepower.” We learn that “she never did. It was her yard, it would be her grass, and she would manage to care for what was hers.” She is much more comfortable once “she had determined her own domain,” concluding, “It worked better if everybody had their place” (pp. 56-57). Madge and Ned practice the same territorial division, with Ned taking care of the outside and Madge the inside. But even though they seem to find the sexual experience mutually satisfying, they cannot communicate that satisfaction in the light of day. They, too, are strangers.

The same set of rules that divide men from women also divide women from women. This is one thing that Sharon is protesting in her scream, the fact that in accepting Ned, Madge must automatically reject her. Men and women are strangers, but their sexual relationship precludes any other relationships. Nothing but superficial loyalties are allowed among women, and, worse still, they are often taught to mistrust and betray each other. Cora enjoys some things about Belle, but she does not trust her. Cora is also annoyed when Lillian Baumann, Sharon's friend, sends Sharon little gifts through the mail. Madge and Ned are forever urging Sharon into relationships with men, and it is clear that Madge will not feel comfortable with Sharon so long as Sharon is single. Ned even implies that he blows on his baby daughter's tummy so that she will “like boys more than girls” (p. 112). There is also a suggestion that the childhood relationship between Madge and Sharon was acceptable mainly because the two were so different from each other.

In defiance of convention, and implicitly, thus, of Cora, Sharon avoids marriage and settles for limited friendships with women. At one point, she even develops a motherly regard for Madge's oldest daughter, Blanche. The girl seems ready to break out of the conventional mold, but after a brief excursion to Sharon Rose's world in Chicago, she slips back and accepts the role Madge and Ned have set for her. Madge's second daughter, Caroline, however, rejects conventional roles, resenting the expectation “that she should like boys more than she did girls” (p. 177). She becomes an avowed feminist, something Sharon would never have considered. Sharon simply wants independence, and freedom to choose relationships other than those like Cora and Emerson's or Madge and Ned's. Sharon is shocked to learn that Caroline's decision against marriage was prompted by her example.

The hidden message behind the cultural practice that disallows real friendship among women and perpetuates a hopeless rift between men and women is, according to Morris, that women are inferior to men. This being the case, no woman in her right mind would choose a woman for a companion over a man. The habitual assumption that women are less valuable than men is spawned quite naturally on the plains where it is generally agreed that a man needs a farmhand and a housemaid more than he needs a companion, and “that a family of girls you couldn't marry off was hardly a blessing to a marriage” (pp. 108-109). Madge is certain that “Another girl she did not want” (p. 140). The mother of Blanche's friend, Libby, apologizes for her daughter and exclaims that to her great relief, “her other children were boys” (p. 155). Ned refers to his automobile as “she” because that is how he says “a man” would “see it” (p. 125). Emerson's comments and attitudes are sometimes more subtly expressed, but they are no less judgmental. For example, we learn that “politics interested Emerson, but he understood its complexities were beyond the grasp of women” (p. 31). He remarks offhandedly that “the problem with a female child was to shut them up once they start talking” (p. 35), or that Cora has failed him because “what a farm needed was sons” (p. 36). When Belle delivers a daughter, Emerson is “annoyed” (p. 47), and when she delivers a second, the narrator observes in wry understatement that it was not “a cause for rejoicing for Emerson” (p. 51). Later, when Fayrene comes, she is just “one girl too many” (p. 66). Even his compliments are a slap in the face. When Cora buys a player piano with her egg money he assures her “that for a family limited to girls she had chosen right” (p. 63).

Morris's concern, however, is not just with what happens to women in a plains culture that insists on rigid distinctions between male and female roles. He is also concerned with what happens to human beings, to both men and women. Ironically, the cultural system that teaches the limited worth of women diminishes men even more. In this book, the women tend to grow stronger in the face of opposition, and the men grow weaker. The weakest characters in the book are men, not women. The dominant pictures of Emerson, Orion, and Ned portray them as ineffectual failures. Certainly, that is one reason why Sharon Rose is not interested in marrying, because she sees what poor weak creatures the men in her life are. And she despises women for giving up their independence to such creatures. When Sharon screams her bitterness for both Cora and Madge to hear, and receives a whack from Cora's hairbrush in return, Cora reads in Sharon's glance “less anger than pity. Pity for Cora, who felt no pity for herself.” Cora understands that “however much Sharon Rose disliked farmers, her scorn for farmers' wives was greater” (p. 76).

Sharon's sense of betrayal in her relationship with Madge and her mixed scorn and pity for Cora have left her with an inner scar to match Cora's outer scar. She fears her own feelings, and backs off from close human relationships. As a musician, Sharon has keen sensitivities and active emotions, but she runs from intimacy. Her friend Lillian apparently wearies of Sharon's evasiveness and terminates their relationship. Her friend Monica is never allowed to get close. Blanche is sent home before she can seriously disappoint Sharon. There is, in fact, only one binding tie in Sharon's life, and that is her tie to Cora, who is at once her rival, her tormenter, her mother, her conscience, and her other self. Sharon goes home to Fayrene's wedding, ostensibly for her sister's sake, but Sharon knows that she is going because she would not dare to be absent “when Cora cried out, ‘Where is Sharon Rose?’” (p. 124) Cora is Sharon's past. She is what Sharon has to come to grips with before she can ever be reconciled to her past. In particular, Sharon must reconcile her attitudes and feelings about male and female sexual roles with those of the seeming strangers who people her past. And Cora is both the defender and the victim of those attitudes. She stands for them even though they put her on the rack.

Cora grimly accepts the means by which children are conceived, and she never “doubted that the nightmare she had survived would result in a child. The logic of it was clear and not to be questioned. The gift of life was holy, and one paid for it dearly” (p. 22). She bears the mark of her sacrifice, a “blue-scarred knuckle” (p. 23) on one hand. She ponders the meaning of sexual union and accepts its horror (“In the wild, cats shrieked. In the bedroom Cora had bitten through her hand to the bone,” p. 36), and Sharon cannot forgive her for accepting it.

Later, as a very old woman, Cora sometimes forgets that she had bitten herself, and thinks of the wound as having been inflicted by a horse. She remembers the truth, however, and her hand throbs in empathetic recognition, when she sees Emerson treat a stubborn horse with mixed cruelty and affection. The incongruency of Emerson's gestures toward the horse triggers anew Cora's memory of the day Sharon screamed. Time telescopes, bringing the event into the present where “now she knew, as she hadn't before, that Sharon Rose had meant it just as she had said it.” Significantly, Cora's next thought is of her bitten hand: “It had not been a horse that bit her; she had bitten herself” (p. 164). In that passage Cora's mind links the two events and thus links Sharon's pain with her own. This is a moment of truth for her, of recognition that Sharon had been justified in screaming against what marriages often meant for a woman on the plains. Cora's own scarred hand is a testimony to the accuracy of Sharon's perception.

Earlier, Cora had not been able to face the truth of what Sharon's scream meant. When Ned and Madge took her with the family to the World's Fair in Chicago, the plan had been for them to meet Sharon one afternoon. But when the appointed time arrived, Cora refused to go: “Cora was possessed by something. She could hear the shrill piercing voice of Sharon, and feel the rage in her body, like that of a trapped animal, when Cora had whacked her palm with the hairbrush.” The others went off, “leaving Cora free to sit on a bench facing the animal cages. … Seated alone, in this throng of people, Cora was seized with a sadness so great her throat pained her” (p. 143).³

Through a lifetime Cora has finally had to come to terms with the meaning of the book's two pivotal events, her own biting of her hand and Sharon's screaming at Madge's betrothal. At the same time, Sharon has had to come to terms with the meaning of her past, and with the meaning of Cora in particular. She makes three trips home, the last two thirty-three years apart, but the reconciliation process does not really begin for her until she learns the difference between independence and freedom. It had been observed that Lillian wanted her independence in order to be free, but that Sharon wanted her freedom in order to be independent. Sharon can never be truly free until she reconciles herself to what Cora and the plains and the others who inhabit the plains of home are, and what they have done to shape her. She cannot free herself by escaping from them. She can free herself only by choosing to accept them. She must finally learn Cora's trick, to achieve freedom by actively choosing what fate has handed out.

It is surely appropriate (if a bit contrived) that as Sharon approaches home to pay her last respects to the dead Cora, she comes face to face with the Women's Liberation Movement, first in the person of Alexandra Selkirk, an international figure in the movement who is bound for a convention in Grand Island, and then in the person of Madge's daughter Caroline. The Movement is, after all, a formal recognition of the male-female rift/dilemma precipitated by growing resistance to restrictive role assignments that exploit and demean women. Had Cora been born in another place and time and convinced that heaven were on her side, she would likely have been at the front of the feminist battle line. Sharon seems to sense this on the plane going home as she looks at the hands of the sleeping Alexandra and observes, almost surprised, that “they were scarless.” She remembers that “a similar pair of hands had gripped her in such manner that she could still feel them” (p. 188), Cora's on that long ago day when Cora “had gripped her by the wrists as she whacked her palms with the hair-brush” (p. 190).

Stopping with Caroline and two of Fayrene's grandchildren (one of them a boy—the “curse” has apparently been lifted) at a museum of prehistoric animals, Sharon is prompted to compare the animals' earlier nonchalance in the face of extinction with that of the large, powerful creatures engaged in a football game in the nearby Nebraska stadium. She thinks of “Alexandra Selkirk: the pleasure she would feel in Man's extinction—her sorrow at Woman's loss” (pp. 193-94). Looking at the remains of the extinct beasts, Sharon thinks, “Who could not see in this … the future of man in a world of women. … Even at this moment the males were gathered in one of their primitive ceremonies, blind as the dinosaur to what was happening. … In the diggings of the future, the football coliseum would be the interment site of an extinct species” (p. 193). Sharon admits that she owes this ingenious bit of logic to Alexandra Selkirk.

The problem with the Women's Movement, as Morris sees it, is that it emphasizes differences that have already been given too much attention. It separates men and women even more, sets them against each other. In Caroline, Sharon encounters again an “us against them” attitude, minus Alexandra's largeness of spirit and saving humor. This is the spirit that divides, and Sharon does not want to exemplify that spirit to Caroline, though she is equally uncomfortable with Caroline's veiled charges of cowardice. Sharon's mood now is one of reconciliation, not division, even toward Caroline, who is much like Cora but has never forgiven Cora for stubbornly accepting her role as Emerson's wife.

Through Sharon, Morris deliberately moves outward from considerations of maleness and femaleness to the larger concern of the humanness of all of us. And it is essentially this humanness to which Sharon must finally be reconciled. Earlier, she had cringed with distaste when Avery Dickel (Fayrene's betrothed) had chipped some tartar off a cat's teeth at the dinner table and extended it congenially for her examination. Now, as the dinner following Cora's burial ends, Blanche's pet bird flies into the room and pecks at the bits of food between Blanche's teeth. Sharon's emotions are “confounded,” but it strikes her that the bird and Blanche seem to have a natural kinship. Recalling the story of another bird's flight through darkness and light, Sharon admits that contradictory experience is “like life itself” (pp. 212-213). She notices, however, that Caroline sits with her eyes lowered, unable to bear the sight of Blanche and her bird. With all her audacious courage to tell the hidden things, Caroline is silenced by what the open act conceals. What is behind Blanche and her bird Caroline can never know. Sharon realizes that “the most appalling facts were those that burned like gems in the open. Not in the bedroom only, or in the barn, or in the mind's dim recesses, but in the shimmering light” (p. 213). No philosophy about male and female roles and needs, no stance on marriage or women's issues, can explain or even confront the larger question of what it is to be human in this world. The old incident comes to mind again: “On the palm of her hand Sharon felt again the stinging slap of Cora's brush” (p. 213). Sharon recognizes that she and Caroline had blundered in the same way, had shouted out about hidden things. But now she knows what Caroline still has to learn, that only when the tongue is silent in “matters that were secret to the heart” is it “possible to guess at what they were” (p. 213).

These realizations come for Sharon in the context of Cora's death and burial. It follows that when we move beyond considerations of male-female role definitions to confront our mutual humanity, we also confront the fact of our mortality. We confront death. Human beings age and die. Morris underlines this fact by leading us systematically through the lives of several generations of people who age before our eyes. Some, like Belle and her infant daughter Eula, die very young. The fact of mortality and certain death thus overrides considerations of sexual roles and freedom, and there is no lasting stay against such a fact. There is a temporary stay, however, and that lies in the acceptance of our own lives. Sharon realizes at last that to deny her past is to deny what life she has. But in reaching that resolution Sharon has to work through what seems to her death's victory anyway. She sees in Cora's death the erasing of Cora's “works and meager effects” which seems a profound “violation, like a shaking of the earth. … Her death was an incident of small importance compared with this ultimate rejection” (pp. 214-15).

Sharon remembers a boy she had met on the train years ago, a boy who was running away, as she had done, to freedom. She wonders, “Had they both grown up and old in order to recover what had escaped them as children?” (p. 215). Sharon at last makes the admission that will ensure Cora some kind of extended life: “As much as or more than the child she had borne, Sharon had been Cora's child” (p. 216). Cora will in some sense survive so long as those in whose past she dwells willingly own that past. Sharon at last accepts her past, knowing that whatever future lies ahead for her, “it would prove to reside in this rimless past” (p. 216). She comes to know the meaning of “mutual kinship” (p. 217) with figures of her past, and seems to recognize that such kinship is the main thing we have. Implicit in this recognition is also the suggestion that cultural expectations about male and female roles are largely an attempt to guarantee human relationship, to ensure binding human ties. Even though they seem sometimes to produce still more painful isolation, they are humanity's attempt at connection, unity. Sharon has to concede that unity is what others are seeking, even though she might be right in perceiving that they rarely achieve it.

The last scene of the novel is in the Crossways Inn where Sharon goes to meet Alexandra Selkirk at the women's assembly. She sees a sign that says “that children under 12, accompanied by their parents, were free,” and asks no one in particular, “Is that possible?” (p. 217). Can children indeed be free if accompanied by their parents? What Sharon is coming to learn is that while independence may require severance from family connection, true freedom may depend on that connection. Mutual kinship is essential to the individual life. There is a touch of sly sarcasm in the narrative voice as on the heels of such realizations Sharon enters the motel and breathes “the bracing air of womanly independence” (p. 218). Thus, Sharon meets the old problems again, the separating and dividing into roles and the sloughing off of ties that bind. Then she sees through an open door the performance of a “corrupt” male in concert whose gyrations simulate the sex act and whose lips mouth the words to obscene songs. Here, then, she confronts the image of male-female relationship in its ugliest possible form, a reminder of all she might have hated in what she guessed Cora had to endure and what she herself had run from. She is both horrified and fascinated. This experience is crucial, however, for it presents a graphic view of Sharon's own distorted notions of sexual experience. She must acknowledge what her mind has made of such experience before she can accept the reality of sex and sexual roles.

Morris's insistence that mortals need each other is further substantiated when in Sharon's half-dream that night she sees a child “wearing a blindfold, groping about as if for companions,” and “a profound recognition sweetens her sorrow” (p. 221). Sharon's experiences in the last few pages of the book lead her ever more surely to reconciliation—with the past, with Cora's silent acceptance, with humanity, with her own self as a sexual being. She is awakened at 1:20 a.m. and summoned by Alexandra Selkirk. On the way she encounters “an amorous couple, the woman in pajamas, … grappling in the warmth of the laundry room,” and she marvels at them, “at the forces that brought such loose ends together, making them one” (p. 222). Not long ago, she would have responded very differently to such an incident, but now she accepts the wonder of urges that accomplish union. Next she sees a couple sitting on the stairs, the woman in obvious distress, the man attempting to give comfort. When she asks, “What can I do?” he replies gently, “Ma'am, what can we do to be saved?” Thus, here in the hallway of the Crossways Inn, Sharon hears perhaps the largest question of all: is salvation possible, and if so, how? The very asking of the question implies that it is possible, the “astonishing statement” itself “like a sign of life in something believed dead.” Sharon feels an old burden lifting, one she “had been reluctant to acknowledge” (p. 223).

She enters the open door of Alexandra's room to find the flamboyant feminist drying her hair after a bath. Sharon reflexively recalls the time when as a child she had guiltily watched Cora in her tub. The other images of Cora flash into her mind. As Alexandra speaks—asking, “Who said let there be light?” “Who saw that all of it was good?” “Who said let us make him in our own image?” “Who said let them have dominion over the whole shebang?” and answering each question with an emphatic, “He did”—Sharon feels “comforted. When she heard the voice of Alexandra she heard His voice, and knew she was in good hands” (p. 224). Cora's God, who had assigned male-female roles in the beginning, now appears, of all things, to be speaking through Alexandra's voice. The unity is complete, the abyss bridged. The language of the Biblical creation paraphrased here by Alexandra is absorbed into Sharon's consciousness through her growing sense of a new world beginning for her. When Alexandra asks how her day went, she thinks, “Of the six days of creation, which one had it been?” She then repeats what had been said by the man on the stairs. Characteristically, Alexandra must make the distinction, draw the dividing line. She asks, “Was it a man or a woman?” Sharon's reply refuses the division: “Both, I think.” At that moment they hear the brazen crow of a rooster, “shrill with young male assurance” (p. 227), and the chauvinistic sound transports Sharon back to remembered sights, smells, and sounds of her childhood. But the language and imagery of redemption proliferate. Morris not only provides the suggestion of the crucifixion in the name of the motel, but also interjects a “cock's crow” into the scene, restoring a myriad of details from Sharon's past “to the glow of life.”

Then, finally, climatically, Sharon perceives in the “flat, skeletal figure” of Alexandra “a resurrection of Cora.” And it is Alexandra/Cora who asks, “Do you know the sun is perpetually rising? Every moment somewhere” (p. 228). She invites Sharon to join her in watching it rise on this particular piece of plains. Sharon goes gladly with Alexandra, indicating that she had “not seen a sunrise” since childhood. In the final lines of the novel Morris completes his vision of Sharon's reconciliation with the past, a reconciliation which allows her to inhabit a new world, different from the one she and Cora had created out of a cultural cliche and a distorted view of what sex and human interdependencies are and mean. Alexandra's final remark suggests a final reconciliation with God's scheme for her too, even though he may seem to have given women a bad shake. She senses that in him resides a broad tolerance that somehow makes all his children acceptable. She shrugs off an impulsive concern over how she might look, going out with scruffed up hair, and clad only in a terry towel robe; but she concludes to go anyway, adding, “Who is there to see me but God?” (p. 229).

Notes

1. Wright Morris, Plains Song (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). All citations will be noted parenthetically in the text. In a conversation between Wright Morris and Wayne C. Booth titled “The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation,” in Critical Inquiry, 3 (Winter 1976), 387-404, the question of whether or not Morris has ever “fully portrayed a sympathetic woman” arises. The two discuss the issue, and Morris insists that he has never “calculated [his] position in regard to women or men or anything else” (p. 400).

2. John W. Aldridge, “Wright Morris Country,” in Robert E. Knoll, ed., Conversations with Wright Morris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), pp. 7-8.

3. It is worth remembering here, as Cora faces the animal cages and thinks of Sharon, that Sharon habitually likened farm people to animals, despising them for what she regarded as subhuman characteristics.