“Good Country People”: Stories by Louise Clarkson and Edith Wharton

In the stories collected as How Hindsight Met Provincialatis (1898), Louise Clarkson hit on the device of contrasting village life and characters in a Southern town she calls Provincialatis with life and characters in a New England village she names Hindsight as experienced by a visitor to the region.¹ She devotes the first half of her book to depicting the residents of the southern town, and the second half to what one reviewer called “the grim spinsters, the angular wives and mothers and the uncompromising fathers of the New England village.”² My contention is that stories in How Hindsight Met Provincialatis piqued Edith Wharton’s interest in writing about rural life, the subject matter of Ethan Frome (1911).

Interestingly enough, however, when Wharton set about writing Ethan Frome, it was not the specifics of the stories Clarkson set in her imaginary Hindsight that inspired her, but those of an earlier Clarkson story, one set in rural Pennsylvania. “The End of an Animosity,” published in Harper’s New Monthly in 1894, will serve as a type for Clarkson’s take on late-nineteenth-century northern rural life.³ She centers her narrative on three people—the sixty-year-old Hannah Bland, her son Elias, and her son’s bride-to-be Christie Ann Ford—in the Pennsylvania village of Zonetown, “peopled chiefly by that pious and unworldly sect called Dunkards” (952). Hannah has inexplicable and unexpressed hatred of the young woman her son has chosen for his bride. She has a demon—a Judas—within her that “would cry out” defiantly: “Know that if Christie Ann Ford marries my son Elias, I will never forgive her in this world or the next” (952). Indeed, so powerful is her enmity towards Christie Ann that she not only desires her death—but that fire be the cause of her death. It comes to seem to her to be a powerful presentiment of the solution to the difficulty that has caused her to live an external life of piety and helpfulness to her fellow villagers and a secret life of betrayal and hatred. But she has read her presentiment wrong. A boating accident brings about a death by water, causing her to believe that she is not the “murderer” (since she thought not “water” but “fire”) and that the drowned one is Christie Ann. That the dead one is Elias she does not discover until she has spent a delirious night in the fields not working through her grief (as the villagers think) but ecstatically convinced that her hatred has been fatefully fulfilled. With morning, and a return home, she comes face-to-face with the corpse of her son and the truth of the fate that is now hers. She falls, “a senseless heap upon the floor, stricken with paralysis.”

Only once did her conscious eyes rest upon Christie Ann after that awful dawn when she had stumbled all unprepared into the presence of her dead. Poor Christie Ann had resolved to devote herself to the stricken mother of her lost lover. But at sight of her the same frightful shriek tore its way from the half-paralyzed throat, and it brought on a second stroke, from which they thought she could not rally. She did partially recover, and lived on, bedridden, torpid, for several years, not speaking an articulate word for weeks.

(956)

There had been “only one human being in the world who saw beyond that soft exterior and caught a glimpse of the other Hannah Bland, the Hannah Bland that God knew and that sometimes knew herself. Beneath that smiling look Christie Ann sometimes saw a fiery gleam in the bright eyes which caused a nameless apprehension” (953). But at the end, one infers, correctly, I think, that “poor Christie Ann” has now bound herself to the bedridden woman whose enmity would not for the world allow her to become her daughter-in-law.

Something beyond the local colorist’s views of small-village life with its small circles of friends and acquaintances, a focus on the corrosive secretive ways of the inner...