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  • The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing
  • Philip Joseph
The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing. By Jean Carol Griffith. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. x + 217 pp. $49.50 cloth.

For the past thirty years, criticism of American regionalism has focused on the late nineteenth century, with works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charles Chesnutt, and Abraham Cahan at the center of the discussion. The general assumption has been that the period of the Gilded Age—of Howellsian realism and the preeminence of the Atlantic Monthly—was the time when regionalism really mattered. More recently, this privileging of the late nineteenth century has undergone a reevaluation, with scholars turning their attention to regionalism's intersection with Modernist aesthetics and the politics of the 1920s and 1930s. Jean Carol Griffith's The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing is an insightful addition to this new [End Page 294] scholarship on early-twentieth-century regionalism. Rather than taking up the regionalist movement that surfaced in the aftermath of World War I with Lewis Mumford, Henry Smith, and Mary Austin, Griffith examines the trio of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow, with a special emphasis on their connections as women writers to the regionalists who preceded them.

According to Griffith, the works of Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow constitute a transitional period for American regionalism, distinguishable on the one hand from depictions of harmonious, unchanging communities in the short stories of Jewett and Freeman and on the other hand from the formal experimentation and rejection of moral standards in Modernism. The trio under consideration distances their work from what they see as the pastoralism that typifies Victorian regionalism. By recognizing "regions as spaces of conflict," all three attempt to modernize a form that, in their view, had circumscribed female characters and enabled the minimizing of women writers (12). At the same time, Wharton, Glasgow, and Cather exhibit admiration for certain qualities of the rural as well as disdain for what they considered the hybrid American "mob" and the rampant commercialism of modern American society. For Griffith, what characterizes these writers is their ambivalence toward both an idealized nineteenth-century region and the democratization of modern America. This ambivalence is expressed in the tendency of their characters to "move and change" (13), traveling from "home base to other places" and allowing for a "comparative treatment of setting" (15).

The Color of Democracy is divided into three parts, each one offering interwoven treatments of novels by at least two of the primary authors. Griffith first examines literary New York as a site of both an old, Anglo-American community and the emerging masses inclusive of new immigrants like Wharton's Rosedale. Her central texts here are Glasgow's The Descendant and Life and Gabriella and Wharton's The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, and the lesser-known Harlem Renaissance novel Twilight Sleep.

In part two, Griffith turns her attention to depictions of the South, in particular the interracial plantation-era family and the new southern woman. Glasgow's The Battle-Ground, Barren Ground, and The Voice of the People are juxtaposed with Cather's Virginia novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, in order to highlight on the one hand the writers' nostalgic attraction to the antebellum family and on the other their interest in industrious farm women and approval of strict segregation as a necessary modern reality. Griffith concludes with a reading of In This Our Life, which, she argues, demonstrates Glasgow's growing skepticism toward the all-white communities of the Jim Crow era.

Griffith concludes by examining the literary landscape of the West in Cather and Wharton. She focuses here on Cather's qualified embrace of Slavic immigrants [End Page 295] like Ántonia Shimerda and ultimately on both writers' disillusionment over the commercialization of the West and the role that western women played in the cultural corruption of America. Throughout her discussions, Griffith sets up her readings of the primary works by linking them to a variety of historical sources and lesser-known novels. While some of the materials at play in these chapters will seem like...

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