Corra Harris and the Divided Mind of the New South

6. Widows as the Only “Free Moral Agents”

6 Widows as the Only “Free Moral Agents” In the prime of her writing career Harris venerated domestic tradition in the popular press and blamed and condemned women for straying from its security , yet in some of her fiction there is marked uncertainty and equivocation about traditional roles. Several of the female characters with whom she as author clearly identified do not celebrate traditional domestic roles, but defy and resist them in subtle ways. Some of the characters reveal confusion more than anything else about gender identity; others reveal clear feminist insight. Six characters from three novels and a short story demonstrate the insight: Jessica Doane in The Jessica Letters (1904), Mary Thompson and Sal Prout in A Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910), Sylvia Story in The Recording Angel (1912), and Miriam Ambrose and Millicent, the narrator, in “The Widow Ambrose” (1920). Jessica Doane illustrates how Harris’s complex ideas on gender roles were developing before Harris established a reputation as a novelist, and how she had come to question traditional gender roles even as she began making her living advocating them. Although the character Jessica Doane waxes eloquently about the strength of romantic love to redeem woman from herself , about the way a woman’s worship of her lover transforms her into the ethereal Goddess of romantic tradition, behind that rhetoric is an astute awareness that conventional young women were not supposed to possess. Jessica is a southern lady, but one far wiser and more self-aware as an affianced youth than the “sad-eyed Madonnas” Harris had used to represent southern women in essays published shortly before The Jessica Letters.1 Unlike the model southern lady, Jessica is by nature a rebel, and this is an instinct she does not want to give up.2 Giving in to love, she explains to her suitor, Philip Towers, is the ultimate sacrifice for her because it means death, “annihilation of self,” loss of “character and personality,” total “absorption” into the self of the lover. Moreover, she knows that she will never be able willingly to commit this act of spiritual suicide; it will take the force of circumstance to bring it about. For her the circumstance, not surprisingly, is love. Widows as the Only “Free Moral Agents” / 115 However, it is not love of her betrothed as a lover but rather as a “portal ” to an intellectual and spiritual reality to which only men have access.3 She wants more than anything else in life to reach the same intellectually and philosophically satisfying heights he has. In her mind he has been able to solve the mysteries of life through mastering philosophy. For her that represents freedom, the kind a woman could only hope to achieve, if at all, through intimate association with a man. Some of the passages from Jessica’s pen mimic more the mystical language of the Song of Solomon than that of the kind of domestic fiction for which it was dismissed by critics. They also reveal Harris’s mystical tendencies and her gradual moving away from institutional Christianity more than they reveal a budding novelist who would make her living selling fiction laced with Victorian domestic ideals. Harris was in her mid-thirties when she penned the letters of Jessica Doane. By then she understood that, unlike many women of her time and place, the concept of personal freedom, but she had not been able to reach it for herself and that motivated her for the rest of her life. In her early forties Harris created the most beloved of all her fictional characters, Mary Thompson, who expresses a greater feminist consciousness than any of Harris’s other characters. A Circuit Rider’s Wife begins with the marriage of itinerant Methodist minister William Thompson to Mary Thompson and ends shortly after William’s death thirty years later. The novel, set in Hart County, Georgia, at the turn of the century, is ostensibly about the hardships William and Mary face on the circuit and about William’s struggle to reconcile his traditional faith with liberal theology. As popular reviewers wrote, it is supposedly about the triumph of marital love and religious faith. An underlying purpose of the book, captured in more critical reviews, was to expose the autocratic nature of the Methodist Church hierarchy as revealed in their calculated unwillingness to support the denomination’s circuit riders. Reputedly autobiographical, the book is based marginally on the short period in Lundy and Corra’s early marriage when...