Gertrude Atherton by Charlotte S. McClure

Abstract

Reviews Gertrude Atherton. By Charlotte S. McClure. (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979. 163 pages, index.) Though quite popular in her day, Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948) has been neglected by most scholars and readers in the three decades since her death. This is probably as it should be. Atherton’s was an ambitious but hopelessly confused mind. She was a towering, vastly opinionated snob. Her best remembered characters, beautiful, spunky, apparently “liberated” young women from California, are quite evidently the projections of their maker’s fond self-image. Atherton’s compensating gifts — a plucky, rambunctious style, an often sustaining narrative technique, and considerable skill in the evocation of remote places and times — were admittedly considerable. But “the difficulty,” as James put it, “is that we are too often at a loss with her, too uncertain as to the degree of [her] intelligence and intention.” Still, in her idiosyncratic way, Atherton was au courant. She had strong notions about contemporary politics; she was concerned with race and class; she seemed to speak with authority about California; and, most crucially, she was obsessed with the plight of women. “There is no human happiness possible,” she once wrote, “save in sex equality.” She is the type of writer, in short, whose works we approach with justified reluctance, but about whom we feel we ought to know more. Quite naturally, therefore, we wel­ come this first full-length study of Atherton’s life and work. Professor McClure commences her study with a brief, copiously de­ tailed, but rather undigested biographical survey. In Chapter 2 she strug­ gles — without much success — to make sense of what we may euphemis­ tically describe as her subject’s “critical theory.” Succeeding chapters are quite sensibly organized around major themes as they emerge from the best of Atherton’s fiction. The volume concludes with a generous summary of the critical record and a very brief overview. A useful chronology and anno­ tated bibliography are also included. Having said this much, it remains to add that Professor McClure hardly satisfies the expectations that we bring to an introductory volume of this kind. Simply stated, her commentary lacks a cutting edge. She has the good sense to ask, “Is [Atherton] significant as a novelist or as a social his­ torian or both?” But she provides little in the way of convincing answers. Numerous observers, following James, have asserted that Atherton’s ideas 146 Western American Literature are confused and contradictory. McClure seems aware of this issue, but she offers no clear response. Kevin Starr has charged that “Gertrude Ather­ ton was a novelist because she wrote novels, not because she had any sense of art or craft or profession.” McClure notes this direct and damning judg­ ment, yet moves on without reply. Atherton is represented to us as a femi­ nist, but her obvious sexism is never explored. Her concern with race is mentioned, yet her blatant racism is ignored. This persistent failure to address major issues is reflected in McClure’s specific formulations. We learn, for example, that “Mrs. Atherton devel­ oped her characters by what they did and by how they reacted to their own actions and those of others.” Though virtually empty of critical content, this sentence is at least clear. The same can be said of this comment on Patience Sparhawk: “Her narration carries the reader through the five parts of the novel by adapting its pace to the sense of time needed to portray the stages of Patience’s development toward the climax of her journey.” But what of “Mrs. Atherton frequently had her heroine fantasize a soul­ mate — a conventional Romantic notion — but one which she employed to characterize an anti-Romantic, self-aggrandizing woman, one who might stimulate the imaginations of her middle-class readers more than the sedate and domestic Howellsian heroines?” There is much learning in this little book, and we must acknowledge that Professor McClure has tackled a frustrating subject. It is also true that her analysis of individual works (especially Black Oxen) is often quite sound. Nonetheless, in Gertrude Atherton Professor McClure has rarely trans­ cended, and often even obscured, the obvious. FORREST G. ROBINSON and MARGARET G. ROBINSON Santa Cruz...