Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Modernist

MATTHEW NICKEL Misericordia University Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Modernist THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY IS TO REASSESS THE WORK OF ELIZABETH Madox Roberts and to identify her unique place as a specifically modernist writer. Critics and scholars of American literature have often been preoccupied with how Roberts fits under the rubrics of southern literature, southern women’s literature, and agrarian/regional literature. While these categories have helped to align Roberts within the wide spectrum of American literature, they have prevented scholarly scrutiny of her work by those outside the purview of southern literary studies. By reevaluating Roberts within the context of modernism, specifically through her unique style that encompasses both voice and landscape, and in particular with the same structural device of the classic epic central to James Joyce and Ezra Pound, my aim is to illuminate the manifestation of modernist techniques in her writing and to broaden our understanding of Roberts’s place in the American literary canon. Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born in 1881 in Perryville, Kentucky, attended the University of Chicago from 1917 to 1921, lived her life primarily in Springfield, Kentucky, and wrote seven novels, two books of short stories, and three volumes of poetry. She died in 1941. In the mid-twentiethcentury,threecriticalvolumesanalyzedRoberts’slifeand writing, and after several decades, a resurgence of Roberts scholarship emerged in conjunction with the founding of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society.1 Though she was a lifelong poet, she is primarily known now for her novels, specifically The Time of Man (1926), My Heart and My Flesh (1927), and The Great Meadow (1930). Critical reception of her work in Roberts’s own time was overwhelmingly positive. The Time 1 The first three volumes dedicated to Roberts are Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E. Foster, Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist (1956); Earl H. Rovit, Herald to Chaos (1960); and Frederick P. W. McDowell, Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1963). The Roberts hiatus lasted then roughly from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Numerous scholars have continued to make new discoveries and connections. Of note: William H. Slavick, who has worked diligently to promote Roberts, her poetry and unpublished material; H. R. Stoneback, who first wrote about Roberts in his dissertation at Vanderbilt in the 1960s and who has been the force behind the Roberts renascence for more than two decades in dozens of essays, keynotes, lectures, and in his role as Honorary President of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society; and Jane Eblen Keller, at work on the official Roberts biography, forthcoming (2019) from the University Press of Kentucky. 414 Matthew Nickel of Man in 1926 was a Book-of-the-Month Club novel, a position that Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises did not earn in that same year. Sherwood Anderson found The Time of Man “Very clear, fine and altogether charming.” “I am humble before it,” he added to his blurb printed on the dust jacket of the second edition of the novel. Robert Penn Warren claimed that “By 1930 . . . it was impossible to discuss American fiction without reference to Elizabeth Madox Roberts” (xxi). Her international status was supported early on by Ford Madox Ford, who saw Roberts as one of the greatest writers of the 1920s generation. He often cited her, along with Ernest Hemingway, as a true modernist and ranked her with James Joyce, declaring that “for me Miss Roberts stands almost supremely alone” (286).2 In his critical essay on Roberts, Ford claims that between The Time of Man and My Heart and My Flesh, a whole quality had been added to literature itself—as if literature itself had a new purpose given to it, as if what literature could do had been extended in its scope, as if the number of emotions that literature could convey had been added to, and as if the permanent change that every book must work upon you had been given a new region in which to exercise itself. (“Elizabeth Madox Roberts” 285) ReadersunfamiliarwithRobertsmightquestionFord’sstatementsand his critical positioning of her as a modernist. The most natural place to consider the validity of his claims is with The Time of Man, a coming-of-age story about Ellen Chesser, whose life is defined and...