Modernism and Mildred Walker (review)

As Carmen Pearson explains, dominant accounts of Modernism have preferred a certain type of author: urban, bohemian, expatriate, anti-establishment. In contrast, Pearson's subject, the novelist Mildred Walker, "didn't end her days in an asylum, kill herself, travel around the world, abandon her children, leave her spouse and run off with another man or woman, or discover that she suffered from liver poisoning, as many tragic figures [of Modernism] did" (49). Instead, Walker lived a conventional life, by Modernist standards: Originally from Philadelphia, she married a doctor and accompanied him to open a practice in Montana, where she raised a family while writing a series of critically acclaimed novels. Despite a long, successful career and a loyal readership, she was all but ignored by scholars of modern American literature. In Modernism and Mildred Walker, Pearson addresses this omission.

Pearson explains that limitations not in Walker's fiction but in the way that the Modernist period has been understood, both within and outside of the academy, account for the decline in Walker's reputation after her death in 1998. Widely identified as a Montana author, Walker's regionalism and subject matter—the everyday lives of ordinary small-town and rural people—did not fit the urban, international, and bohemian settings for which Modernist writing is known. A relatively private person, Walker attracted far less attention than her bohemian contemporaries. Pearson makes the case that Walker's apparently conventional persona and literary style should not exclude her from the Modernist movement; instead, she should be located in the context of a contemporaneous politics of modernism that privileged certain authors and obscured others.

Citing Astradur Eysteinsson's warning in The Concept of Modernism that Modernism should not be identified solely with the avant-garde (45), Pearson maintains that Walker's conservatism should be understood as a different kind of Modernism rather than a flaw or weakness in her Modernist practice; moreover, relative to her own highly conservative social circle, some of Walker's choices were indeed quite radical. For example, Walker's first publication was considered scandalous. She agreed to marry on the condition that she would not be required to do laundry or dishes (52). For the most part, however, Walker preferred to mark off her art from her life, and it was in her art where she preferred to push the social and ideological boundaries in which she lived. Stylistically, too, she can be read as conservative by Modernist standards unless we bear in mind that she shared her preference for simple, pared-down language with the likes of Hemingway.

Lucid examples from Walker's fiction convey a version of modernism developed through the lives of quite ordinary and conventional people: a young woman who runs a brewery, a Montana farming community, a group of easterners touring the Rockies. Again, Pearson hones in on ideological constructions that make Walker a "problem" Modernist: Hemingway openly criticized women writers who dared to write about war, and Modernist criticism preferred a "male and combatant-oriented" canon, whereas Walker addressed the noncombatant experience in her writing about war. She openly resisted feminist readings of her work, yet Pearson argues that her work demonstrates "a modern sense of gender" through complex male and female characters who "grapple with questions of gender and struggle for fulfillment through an escape from the traditional, binary roles they find themselves caught within" (142, 154). Perhaps Walker is most characteristically Modernist in her treatment of movement as both full of promise and excitement and threatening to traditional, more "human" ways of life. If Fitzgerald's objective correlative for this ambivalence is the automobile, Walker's is the bicycle that both liberates her female characters and involves them in various collisions or the team of horses that hauls kegs for a woman's successful brewery but tramples her husband in a deadly accident.

Pearson's analyses are clearly and carefully theorized but without depending upon jargon or alienating general readers, whom she clearly includes as a potential...