The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing

Conclusion: “Always, Everywhere, Inferior"

Conclusion “Always, Everywhere, Inferior”: Regionalism as/and Minority Status The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—: and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less.This incredibly limited not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. —James Baldwin,“The Price of the Ticket”(1985) Throughout my examination of works by Cather, Glasgow, and Wharton, I have tried to show how these writers use regionalism, an accepted form of women’s literary production,to explore and comment upon the changes they witnessed in social constructions of citizenship at the turn of the twentieth century. And I have argued that in order to do so, these women revised the ways in which regions were portrayed, disavowing any affiliation between their works and earlier regionalism and highlighting regional comparison and conflict in the process.1 In closing, I would like to return briefly to a point I made at the beginning of my discussion: that the attractiveness of regionalism to white women writers like Wharton, Glasgow, and Cather partly lies in its being geographically equivalent to their own social position and to the social positions of their characters. Despite being marginalized, white women are considered members of a larger, national “imagined community ,” to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, just as regions themselves are.2 The three women writers I’ve discussed in this study all employ multiple regional settings to explore their own marginalization and to claim their authority to speak on the marginalization of others, and their perspectives contributed to debates about democracy that were fundamental in shaping American culture in the first half of the twentieth century.Those debates are critical to the ongoing scholarly discussions concerning the supposedly progressive or retrograde nature of women’s regional writing. As Fetterley and Pryse write, it is important to consider “how and whether race emerges as 178 Conclusion a concern within a movement defined primarily by gender” and “whether ‘white’ itself constitutes a racial marking in regionalism,” which, I have argued , it does inescapably.3 Indeed, in the final analysis, what my examination of women’s regionalism suggests is that it is a literary mode that is more comfortable and fitting for white women than for writers of other oppressed groups. While Fetterley and Pryse, covering an earlier set of regionalists, conclude that “regionalism becomes a site where questions of race and questions of gender find mutual and dynamic articulation for both white writers and writers of color,” my own comparisons between Glasgow, Wharton, and Cather and other writers reveal that such mutuality only goes so far.4 The marginalization of white women shares several characteristics with that of other groups, but there exists one important difference between white women, on the one hand, and, on the other, men and women of racial and ethnic minorities (however racial and ethnic differences are defined in a given historical moment) that is critical to regionalism: at no time in the history of American patriarchy have white women been considered outsiders (or strangers, in regionalist parlance) in the same ways immigrants and people of color have. For instance, Lily Bart, like many women characters I have discussed, longs for spatial transcendence and repeatedly attempts to leave New York for Europe, first by her brief engagement to a European and later in her sojourn there after being ejected from Bertha’s yacht. Figuratively and literally homeless throughout The House of Mirth, Lily lacks the authority to control her place in her society.But her search for spatial and communal alternatives to New York—in Europe and among figures such as Selden, Gerty, and the Gormers—never negates her status as a New Yorker,even as she vacillates in her loyalties to her community. Likewise, Ellen Olenska’s inability to live in New York (because it is too near Archer) is the surest indication that despite her exile she is an insider. For in making the sacrifice to leave Archer and New York and in refusing to return to the morally shady region occupied by her husband,as her...