Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936

Preface

Preface This book is about seven white southern women who, before the Southern Literary Renaissance, tried to come to terms with their experience by writing fiction and succeeded—at least in the practical sense of surviving to another day as professional writers. They are: AugustaEvans, Grace King, KateChopin, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Newman , and Margaret Mitchell. All seven were raised to be southern ladies, physically pure, fragile, and beautiful, socially dignified, cultured , and gracious, within the family sacrificial and submissive, yet,if the occasion required, intelligent and brave. The tension between the demands of this cultural image and their own human needs lay close to the source of their creativity; that tension is expressed thematically in their fiction, often as the conflictbetween a public self and a private one or in the imagery of veils and masks. In fact, the very act of writing itself evoked within these women a sense of self-contradiction, for southern ladies were expected to defer to men's opinions, yet writing required an independent mind. The wide variance in the quality of their fiction and in the depth of the understanding and control they gained in their lives attests in part to that selfdivision . Because I am interested in the relationship between their experience and their creativity, I have chosen to discuss in this book those of their works that most directly address the question of southern womanhood . The works are: Evans' Beulah (1859); King's Monsieur Motte (1886, 1888), "Bonne Maman" (1886), and "The Little Convent Girl" (1893); Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and several stories; Johnston's Hagar(iQi3); Glasgow's Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella (1916); Newman's The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928); and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936). These fictions differ dramatically in popularityas well as quality. Evans' and Mitchell's novels were best sellers; Newman's were barely known. I have been less interested in these differences, however, than in the common terms in which these various writers articulated their experi- Xli PREFACE ences and envisioned their ideals. Popular or obscure, artisan or artist, they confronted fundamentally similar experiences in strikingly similar ways, despite their historical and geographical differences. In theirfiction , all criticize the ideal of southern womanhood point by point in similar ways, and by means of similar imagery, plotting, characterization , and narrative point of view. Some ultimately retreat from the critique , some envision alternative ways to define men and women and to organize community, and some find their material to be the stuff of tragedy. The ideal of southern womanhood that informed these women's lives and fictions not only often conflicted with their actual human needs but also contained its own internal ambiguities and contradictions. When the image exhorts both intelligence and submission, both bravery and fragility, conflict seems inevitable. Such ambiguities are, of course, at the very heart of the literary imagination: one thinks of Edna Pontellier swimming to her death to be free, or of Quentin Compson saying, "I dont hate [the South]. . . . / dontl I dont hate it! I dont hate it!" Literature therefore seems a particularly appropriate place to look for reflections upon southern womanhood. But that ideal did not serve only as a norm for individual behavior; it became also a central symbol in the South's idea of itself. With all her paradoxes, the southern lady has represented the best of the South. Southern women thus confront a particularly tenacious image of true womanhood. Chapter One begins with an investigation of the sources, ideological use, and persistence over time of the image of the southern lady in the mind of the South. It then offers some historical and some speculative material concerning the conditions in which the southern woman who wrote found herself, and introduces in more detail the seven writers to be discussed. Each subsequent chapter is devoted to the experience of a single writer and the close analysis ofone or moreof her works. Finally, the conclusion gathers together some of the threads that have appeared in the fabric of the individual works. Every bookis shaped byits writer's experience and predilections; this one is no exception. I grew up in the South, and thus I have known firsthand both the appeal and the threat of becoming a southern lady. Like many southern white women of my generation, I felt the fissures of southern life as personal rifts, ultimately requiring personal choices. The image of the lady awed...