Regional Insularity and Aesthetic Isolationism: Ellen Glasgow’s The Builders and the First World War

As a Virginian with a hereditary pride in the land that produced a Washington and a Jefferson, Ellen Glasgow left behind a rich, unique commentary on the major issues of her era and her region, not the least of which involved the evolution of southern letters from the “evasive idealism,” as she called it, of the plantation school of literature she so ardently abhorred. Born as she said with a “nonconformist mind” (“What I Believe” 219), Glasgow’s active involvement in women’s issues and her protection of animals have been well documented in critical collections such as Julius Raper’s Ellen Glasgow’s Reasonable Doubts and elsewhere, yet she was strangely passive in her response to the onset of World War I and American involvement later on. Although war in general created the social injustices and psychological hardships Glasgow deplored—and the technological advancements employed in World War I would magnify the devastation beyond prior human comprehension—except for granting an interview or two during the war itself, she remained relatively silent in both word and action as one of the greatest world-shaping events of her lifetime raged. Glasgow biographer Susan Goodman attributes the author’s silence to her overall fatalism about humanity’s propensity to hurt the innocent, either human or animal, and Glasgow affirmed some years later on the brink of another that “war is always an obscene horror” (Woman 229). Of World War I specifically, she would record in her memoir, “in the beginning, I had shared the general hysteria, but this passed quickly, leaving me with a poignant disgust, more sickening than pain, for a world I would not have created” (233). Glasgow knew emotional upheaval often derailed, if not almost altogether obliterated, her artistry at crucial times, as did the penetrating grief resulting from the deaths of her mysterious married lover Gerald B; as her sister Cary has revealed Glasgow feared getting caught up emotionally in destruction on such a vast scale. Empathetic to a fault, she simply did not initially have the will to ruminate about present international affairs lest they obscure her artistic sensibilities, as she knew they likely would.

Once she did comment on World War I, she chose to eschew actual warfare as her subject, turning instead to the political spirit of the Great War in The Builders (1919), a novel composed during her tempestuous relationship and engagement to Richmond lawyer and bon vivant Henry Anderson, and, according to Susan Goodman and Pamela Matthews, heavily influenced by Anderson’s political philosophies (147; 93–96, respectively). The narrative explores those days of early national debate about American intervention in the two-year old European war, and in a sense, given its date of publication in novel, versus serial, form, Glasgow offers a post-armistice vision, suggesting to those early American isolationists that the ends of the war justify the means. In the text, Glasgow compares Virginia’s well-entrenched Democratic political machine to American isolationists who would diminish America’s broader influence in world affairs, just as the South and Virginia, as Glasgow will argue, had been denied a role in shaping American political and cultural affairs by privileging the stifling legacy of the past. It is Glasgow’s revolt here against antiquated regional insularity and the residual “evasive idealism” of southern literature and culture that I am concerned with in this essay. As an exploration of The Builders and other Glasgow commentary of the period reveals, Glasgow’s assertions about regional insularity parallel her point of view on southern aesthetics, as she on one hand laments war’s destruction while simultaneously recognizing its potential for expanding regional influence and artistic boundaries. As an analysis of Glasgow’s immediate post-bellum output further demonstrates, by extension, the byproduct of this expansion or broadening for Glasgow resulted in changes to her own aesthetic perspective and novelistic method, catalyzed by personal heartbreak directly linked to the events of World War I. What starts out as a political or social allegory in The Builders emerges for Glasgow as an emphasis on...