The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing

Introduction: Writing Region in the New Century

Introduction Writing Region in the New Century Edith Wharton once summed up her attitude about modern America thus: “I wanted the idols broken . . . but . . . by people who understood why they were made.”1 Wistfully lamenting the destruction of cultural “idols”—beliefs not necessarily true in an empirical sense, but nonetheless symbolically significant—Wharton especially regrets that they are being destroyed by those who do not understand their origin. She shares this characterization of turn-of-the-century America, though not precisely the same attitudes about it, with the two other writers who most concern me here, Ellen Glasgow and Willa Cather. In her autobiography, The Woman Within (1954), and in many of her novels, Glasgow attributes an “evasive idealism” to the Old South, a contradictory phrase suggesting that antebellum southern society had attempted to reach some standard of perfection only by eluding reality, by practicing misdirection.Cather echoes both writers in a review of George Bernard Shaw when she asserts that nineteenth-century culture was built upon a chimeric foundation, one that is being threatened in the present: “Why not leave us our illusions,” she asks, “since this is a short journey and cold, and mostly in the dark, and we believe, at least, that they comfort us.”2 For all three women,what is not true in the strictest sense (“idols,”“illusions,” “evasive idealism”) was nonetheless influential in shaping and perpetuating societies that, in their own historical moment, are in danger of erasure. And for all three, as Wharton makes most clear here, this danger is associated with outsiders.Facing the passing of the old century and the birth of the new one with much ambivalence, these women set themselves apart from many of the traditions in which they were raised, particularly those enforcing restrictions on women, but they also distanced themselves from several characteristics of modernity.The feelings of temporal liminality,of being neither 2 Introduction wholly of the nineteenth-century past nor of the twentieth-century present , that they expressed in letters, criticism, and autobiographical writings often manifest themselves as spatial liminality in their fiction. Constituting what Glasgow,referring to several of her Virginian novels,calls a “social history ”of a region in transition,Wharton’s depictions of Old and modern New York,Glasgow’s of the Old and New South,and Cather’s of the pioneer and settled West share a similar contrast between the past and modernity: while all three former societies are characterized as naïve, orderly, and cloistered, the turn-of-the-century region is depicted as chaotic, corrupt, and crowded. Peopled with societies at once cultivated and pastoral, the regional past, according to these writers, was a necessarily fleeting age wedged between the establishment of American civilization and the overcivilization associated with American modernity. Glasgow’s Old South, Cather’s pioneer West, and even Wharton’s Old New York are provincial and peripheral, as are all pastoral societies, to the north, the east, and Europe, respectively. But as much as these writers point to the follies of the past and mock the closemindedness of past regional societies, they also insist that these societies made important contributions to the nineteenth-century development of a uniquely American culture.Their descriptions of the past evoke the pastoral as “a means of rearticulating,rather than abandoning,worldly concerns,”3 for their works attribute a stability to regional communities that is achieved by keeping people socially as well as geographically in their places. In A Backward Glance (1934),for instance,Wharton tells us that her Old New York ancestors were “the heirs of an old tradition of European culture,” yet because they possessed a distinctly American “standard of uprightness in affairs,”this group “shaped the national point of view.”4 Considered by Wharton to be the descendants of the Dutch and English founders of her native city, Old New Yorkers in her works trace their ancestry back to the European aristocracy , or at least to the well-to-do merchant classes, and are thus imagined to be as different from their fellow countrymen of other classes and ethnicities than they are from their ethnic peers in the Old World.The “strict”standards with which Wharton endows the society into which she was born require a rigid adherence to tradition and the vigilant maintenance of boundaries between Old New Yorkers and outsiders, what The Age of Innocence’s Henry van der Luyden calls “republican distinctions.”5 “Like all agreeable societies,” Wharton writes of her...