Ellen Glasgow and the Southern Agrarians

Abstract

ing tendencies of a scientific age, is one quality Glasgow obviously holds in common with the Agrarians.2 Moreover, the kinds of details she provides, whether in the description of setting in Barren Ground or in the analysis of social relationships and psychological complexity in Sheltered LiJe or Vein of Iron, tie her to the Southern Renascence traditions discussed by Allen W. Becker and C. Hugh Holman.3 Besides an anti-industrial bias, Becker finds an awareness of the presentness of the past which places Glasgow's novels solidly in the Southern literary mainstream. And certainly ample evidence in Glasgow's critical writing suggests the importance for her of tradition and the Southern myth. In a I928 essay in Harper's she commented: The race that inherited a heroic legend must have accumulated an inexhaustible resource of joy, beauty, love, laughter and tragic passion. To discard this rich heritage in the pursuit of a standard utilitarian style is, for the Southern novelist, pure folly.4 Glasgow's satire was directed not at social conventions which preserve tradition but at empty rituals which no longer reflected tradition. Although Glasgow's characters may reject or revise certain tenets of a prevailing code of manners or morals, they are never free to reject all codes.5 Indeed, a number of characters take responsibility for preserving order in place of fallen civilization. need to 2 Louise Cowan offers an excellent study of this Southern literary outcropping in Fugitive Group (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, I959), chaps. I-3. Agrarians, successors to the Fugitives, are the subject of a special issue in Mississippi Quarterly, I'll Take My Stand: Fifty Years Later, ed. Thomas D. Young, vol. 33