The Color of Democracy in Women’s Regional Writing (review)

In comparison to the great number of works published during the past twenty years that have addressed the ways in which American regionalist fictions participated in debates about race, gender, class, and nationhood from 1865 to 1914, there have been very few which investigate how the works of a later generation of regionalist authors dealt with these issues between 1914 to 1945. The present volume helps fill this gap by examining how three women regionalist fiction authors—Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather—engaged these discourses as they questioned the implications of modern American democracy between approximately 1900 and 1945.

Griffith shows how these authors were initially inspired by the goal of producing more realistic depictions of their regions (Wharton’s “Old New York,” Glasgow’s “Old South,” and Cather’s “Pioneer West”) than they believed the “Local Color” writers who preceded them had created. In this way, these three would appear to have been modernists, embracing that movement’s strong bias towards urban cosmopolitanism. Yet, as Griffith demonstrates, when they contrasted the people, cultures, and values of their respective regions with the modern world, Wharton, Glasgow, and Cather found themselves conflicted, for they found the latter to be “chaotic, corrupt, and crowded” and quite threatening in various ways. As Griffith argues, “the fuller democratization of the modern age . . . was associated with images of an amorphous yet conformist ‘mob’ or ‘crowd.’”

And who made up this “mob” or “crowd”? According to Griffith, in these writers’ fictions the debased modern American culture was most often associated with “outsiders” to their regions or, in Wharton’s terms, “invaders”: Jews, African Americans, non-Nordic “ethnic” immigrants, and materialistic midwestern and western businessmen and women. In response to such threats, these writers, even though they did not envision their respective regions completely positively, nonetheless portrayed their regions’ inhabitants and cultures as possessing greater moral stability, more clearly-defined class and racial boundaries (Glasgow and Cather especially, Griffith suggests, idealized a mythical Southern “family black and white” in which there were supposedly strong ties of mutual affection), and a greater appreciation of superior western and northern European cultural standards. Ultimately, Griffith concludes, these writers were unable to overcome their strong affiliations to region, race (white), gender, and class in order to become “modern” Americans who accepted a democratic culture dominated by an increasingly heterogeneous populace.

One of the best parts of this book is the way it situates discussions of the three authors’ fictions amidst the wide-ranging contemporary debate about the future of democracy among eugenicists Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and Thurman Rice; cultural pluralists Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne; and compromisers Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt. Another is the way it includes not only a good number of Wharton’s, Glasgow’s, and Cather’s better-known works—such as The House of Mirth, Barren Ground, and My Ántonia—but also many of their lesser-known novels, such as Wharton’s Twilight Sleep and The Gods Arrive; Glasgow’s The Descendant and In This Our Life; and Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

Wharton, Glasgow, and Cather scholars will most appreciate how this book often provides insightful analyses of a very select number of their fictions (the analysis of My Ántonia’s ethnic dimensions, for instance, is excellent). Because of its narrow focus on these three authors, however, Griffith’s book sheds little light on how “Women’s Regional Writing” interacted with American culture during this period. To accomplish that goal, it would have been necessary to include at least one of the much more popular—yet now critically-neglected—women regionalists of the period, such as Gene Stratton-Porter, Dorothy Canfield (Fisher), Zona Gale, Octave Thanet, or Bess Streeter Aldrich. One would also have needed a more representative sampling of regions; how, for instance, did women regionalists from the Far West depict Asian immigrants or New England authors represent French Canadians? Rather surprisingly, too, this book...