Caroline Gordon’s Ghosts: The Women on the Porch as Southern Gothic Literature

Abstract

Soon after its publication in 1944, Caroline Gordon's The Women on Porch--her sixth novel--generated two reviews in The New York Times. The first, by Orville Prescott, noted that novel's dust jacket depicted the figure of young woman fleeing from nameless terrors of dark forest, and that encircling gloom that menaces her ... billows and eddies pages of [the] cryptic and peculiar (17). Prescott also conveyed that Gordon's latest work wandered through series of spirals and convolutions of time and place and thought, slipping from stream of consciousness of one character to that of another, from Tennessee to New York, from present to past (17). The result was an elusive [and] haunting, taut and twisted, work that like novels of a number of her fellow Southern[ers] shared a preoccupation with death and decay and destruction ... [While] she does not engage in ghoulish melodramatics of Faulkner ... her sense of doom and frustration is [just] as great (Prescott 17). The second review, written by Lorine Pruette, similarly underscored novel's modernist and gothic elements, specifically its thick shadows of past, its depiction of struggle between Old and New South, and its intricate narrative form--a modified stream-of-consciousness technique ... [which] admirably evokes mood (BR6). Much of other criticism that followed initial publication of The Women of Porch focused on mythological framework of novel, which is based on saga of Orpheus's and Eurydice's descent into, and escape from, Hades; heroic quests of protagonists; and its innovation in structure. Agrarians Andrew Lytle and Brainard Cheney were among first to recognize literary merits of Gordon's novel. Cheney was particularly laudatory, describing it as profoundly informed by tradition and history. The Women on Porch, he predicted, would be novel that would last because it not only gives us realism of [its] time but [also] characters, places, and situations which tend toward [the] symbolic representation of our experience (Cheney 149-150). Despite this initial excitement, over years The Women on Porch has been marginalized in favor of earlier Gordon works such as Penhally (1931), Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), and None Shall Look Back (1937), which have come to dominate Gordon criticism. The Women on Porch has been categorized either, at worst, as succession of frozen moments, each with its own prearranged meaning ... [with] no progression, no plot ... [just] elegiac pattern of decline and fall (Gray 157) or, at best, as transitionary in that it signals Gordon's movement away from grand historical novels about Old South (Brown 367), and toward critiquing Agrarian agenda espoused in earlier works. What has been lost in these analyses, however, is Prescott's and Pruette's original emphasis on novel's gothic elements, which not only position it among many of greatest contributions to Southern Renaissance but also serve as framework to examine some of Gordon's concerns with Agrarian manifesto. In particular, gothic elements in The Women on Porch address unresolved antagonism between Old and New South, feasibility of their agenda in an increasing urban and industrial mid-twentieth-century South, and role of women within this shifting social dynamic. This essay seeks to recuperate and expand upon these initial interpretations of The Women on Porch by considering novel as an example of Southern Renaissance literature which uses gothic elements to question Agrarian cause--quite daring project for Gordon given that she was married to one of movement's founders and an unofficial member herself (Tunc, Recuperating 182-183). Only by placing novel in dialogue with other prominent works of Renaissance can its literary lineage be restored and its deep criticism of southern society be revealed. …