The Southern Lady from Pedestal to Terra Firma: Isa Glenn's Southern Charm

Abstract

The Southern Lady from Pedestal to Terra Firma:Isa Glenn's Southern Charm Veronica Makowsky Isa Glenn (1874–1951) is yet another acclaimed woman writer who disappeared from the male-created and male-dominated literary canon after the Second World War. In her case this patronizing devaluation was exacerbated by the patriarchal and racial values of many of the male stars of the Southern Renaissance. Donald Davidson, a Southern Agrarian, sneered: Into their realism of social history or satire come doctrinaire attitudes which are as unhealthy as the undue exaggeration of southern traditions for which writers of the older school have been blamed. They are imported, not native attitudes, and they cause one to reflect how poor an exchange scorn is for sentimentality. In the novels of Frances Newman [her fellow Atlanta native] or the lighter works of Isa Glenn, the deliberate puncturing of pretensions thought to be southern smacks of a paying-off of old scores: the southern woman, now intellectually as emancipated as her northern sister, takes a dig at the tradition that would have kept her in "woman's place." (201) Glenn was the recipient of this dismissive slap because she was a menace to the Old Order of the South, preferring "scorn" to the "sentimentality" surrounding the southern "lady." Even worse, she was a popular and successful threat since, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, her eight novels sold well and were critically acclaimed. They were advertised and reviewed in major newspapers and magazines throughout the country, often accompanied by interviews with or profiles of their elfishly diminutive and opinionated creator. In addition to the literary merits of her fiction, Glenn is noteworthy as a particularly fascinating, even extreme, example of artistic and personal creation and re-creation. As her experience widened beyond the South, Glenn learned that the southern lady was more than the attractive façade of racism and sexism. [End Page 289] She was its dupe and its victim, as Southern Charm (1928) demonstrates through the gradual enlightenment and liberation of the elderly Mrs. Habersham, the epitome of stultified and stultifying southern gentility, as she learns from the struggles of her daughters and granddaughter. Like Mrs. Habersham, Glenn emancipated herself, bit by bit, from the sentimental cage of southern ladyhood. Glenn's formative years were spent on the cusp between tradition and modernity. She was born into two old southern families of distinguished lineage with the obligatory links to George Washington and Confederate officers. She was also a daughter of Atlanta, Georgia, the exemplar of the modernizing South; indeed, she was the oldest child of one of its mayors, John T. Glenn. As a girl and young woman, Glenn tried to be at once the avatar of the southern debutante and leader of young Atlanta society while pursuing her interests in the visual arts, particularly painting and print-making, with the quixotic patronage of James MacNeil Whistler. She tried her hand at genealogy and society journalism. Glenn was always just a little too advanced, a little too clever, a little too much her own person to fit neatly into the expectations of Atlanta's elite young-adult set. She had a broken engagement with a rising young southern newspaper editor when she was twenty-three, but did not marry until she was almost thirty, quite late for her social station. Her husband, Army officer J. Bayard Schindel, not only got her out of Atlanta, but took her all over the world, from dusty army bases in the US West to the Far East. Through her travels, she learned that the South was a microcosm of the greater world: dominated by racism, colonialism, imperialism, and, of course, misogyny cloaked by paternalism. She continued to dabble with her printmaking as she attempted homemaking on the fly, moving constantly in service to her husband's career. After a stillbirth, she raised a son, Bayard Schindel, who remained in many ways the light of her life. As Carolyn G. Heilbrun points out in Writing a Woman's Life (49–50, 126), women of Isa Glenn's era did not follow the male model of a steady progression and development from early career to late...