Kimberly Sanford
A general understanding of American literary modernism is primarily informed by high school and college curricula that focus on authors’ writing between 1915 and 1945. These curricula frequently omit significant writers who also have literary merit and cultural value but have been ousted from the main stage. Literary scholars and related academics may have a more nuanced grasp on the movement, but the widely accepted view highlights a select few authors who represent a narrow scope of the modernist tradition. As such, when in conversation about this movement and its exemplary writers, one will frequently encounter the names of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as the two idols who largely shape this incomplete definition of modernism. Contrasting the sensationalized lives of artists and socialites is the regionalist writing of authors whose work centralizes a traditional way of life through a modernist lens. Regional modernism is interested in the relationships characters maintain to other common people within their small communities, and to the land on which they live, a focus that may seem limiting considering the expansive nature of other canonical modernist texts. As Catherine Morley notes,
On the face of it, the combination of modernism and regionalism can seem a contradiction in terms. After all, modernism is synonymous with the international avant-garde, stylistic experimentalism and formal innovation, whereas regionalism brings with it connotations of nostalgia, parochialism and literary realism…the negative connotations of sentimentality, folk wisdom, localism and resistance to wider national forces continue to be associated with much regional writing. (104)
Nonetheless, these precise locales and characters capture the modernist exploration of emerging consciousness and enduring the human condition while centralizing the experiences and landscapes of rural America.
Two women who exemplify this emergence into self-actualization are Ántonia in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and Ellen in Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Time of Man. In both texts, the main female protagonists participate in the agricultural economy of their locale, in addition to maintaining the social fabric of their family units through domestic work. This deeply undervalued work is the undercurrent of American society but too often is disregarded as an inevitable part of every woman’s daily duties. Reflecting the life of domestic workers challenges the readily accepted view of the modernist movement as predominantly male and primarily focused on the upper echelons of society. Through this physical connection to the land of their region and an exploration of the lives of women, Cather and Roberts demonstrate both the essential work frontier women do and the interiority of their characters. Agricultural or homesteading work is at the root of rural communities,and the texts of Cather and Roberts preserve the enduring legacy of this labor as essential to sustaining life for the individual and the collective.
The significant contrast between the work of regional writers and that of more celebrated modernists is palpable to the reader who tends to the subtle hominess cultivated in the words of Cather and Roberts. This sincere tenderness is characteristic to the comforts of the simple life depicted in these rural narratives; a life that literary critics with a new historical view see as equally meaningful to this canon as other modernists concerned with “high culture.” To use the words of Daniel Joseph Signal,
Another problematic view of Modernism equates it exclusively with the philosophy and style of life of the artistic avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century […] The entire movement according to this definition, was comprised essentially of a small number of high talented poets and painters based in the bohemian quarters of certain large cities such as Paris, New York, Vienna, and Berlin. (Signal 8)
Signal’s position is shared by those who seek to look beyond the most canonical modernist texts to find those which also represent the vastness of the American experience. Signal again provides a useful distillation: “Put simply, the quintessential aim of Modernists has been to…heal the sharp divisions that the nineteenth century had established in areas such as class, race, and gender” (12). Healing these divisions demands a critique of the gendered social expectations that have caused so much dysfunction within the cultural climate in which modernist authors were writing.
Cather and Roberts’ particular focus on women’s roles in life-sustaining labor undercuts the false assumption that women worked exclusively in the home on domestic duties, including sewing and baking. As evidenced by Cather’s title character, Ántonia is eager to participate in the physical labor typically ascribed to male family members, even as a young child. Ántonia wants to work alongside her brothers and father in the fields; she is less inclined to stay inside and tendsto unseen domestic duties. In “Women Writing About Farm Women,” Becky Faber explores the nature of rural women’s work and the indispensable role they play in maintaining their family structures and communities. Faber argues that this work is both functional and artistic:
Art is judged by how long it lasts, whereas the most common artistry of women is occasional and impermanent: food cooked, clothes sewn, letters written. These are consumed, worn out, thrown away, and they go out of style if kept too long[…]Women, by their own account, do all they can to keep stable the lives of others in their care; they work so hard to see that as little as possible ‘happens’ that their writing obliges us to look deeper, to the very repetitive daily-ness that both literature and history have schooled us away from. (115)
The daily-ness that Faber highlights might be less exhilarating to some readers than bullfights, extravagant parties, and interpersonal conflict between socialites, but it is the stuff of a simple life, rooted in soil and enriched by family. Simplicity is what often differentiates the characters of regional modernism from the works of more canonical writers. While their lives are painted by physical exertion, within the home and outside of it, their inner lives are immensely rich and informed by the close-knit communities they occupy. Additionally, the socially constructed binaries that often characterize Hemingway and Fitzgerald are debunked in the works of Cather and Roberts. Modern gender expectations inform the notion that women’s labor is exclusively found indoors while men’s work is connected to the surrounding landscape. Both women characters in My Ántonia and The Time of Man move fluidly between these spaces. Claudia Yukman demonstrates this fluidity in her article “Frontier Relationships in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.” Yukman further reinforces the important division between the writing of regional authors and other modernists in articulating that, “By identifying the frontier as feminine, the American pastoral invents a genre which only differs from the realistic or domestic novel in the particular sites and subjects to which it relegates the feminine. The American pastoral […] represents itself as an exploration of a psychic frontier where men can be free from social conventions and institutions” (96). But this freedom is not reserved exclusively for men. The autonomy that Ántonia grows into is not reckless abandon; she is an independent person who is still grounded in her commitment to family and the deep connections she maintains to domestic structure. Her unwavering dedication to this structure is best depicted in the final scenes of the novel when Ántonia speaks directly to her experiences for the first time. As Faber observes,
At this point Ántonia has developed a community[…] Now Ántonia finally gives voice to her story, telling Jim of her family and about mutual friends…Not only does Ántonia speak for herself, but she also presents the reader with a more realistic family life and sense of continuity[…][T]he reader can see beyond [Jim’s] words to know that Ántonia’s story will continue through the generations that have been so carefully illustrated. (117)
Until this point in the novel, the reader’s perception of Ántonia is informed entirely by Jim Burden’s recollection of her. When she is finally given a chance to speak for herself, it is apparent that she is content with the life she has built despite the hardships she has endured. Emerging as a self-assured woman out of the difficulties of a childhood on the plains, Ántonia’s voice is a powerful closing testament to the endurance of the frontier woman’s inner spirit. When detailing the new chapter of her life, Ántonia says to Jim, “We’d never have got through if I hadn’t been so strong[…]I was able to help [my husband] in the fields right up to the time before my babies came. Our children were good about taking care of each other” (252). Ántonia continues on from this point to further detail the growth and development of her family and the deep love she has for those who reciprocate that affection. This strong reverential overtone indicates not only her satisfaction but the true fulfillment and happiness that has sprouted from the soil of her hard work.
Elizabeth Madox Roberts provides a closer account of the main character’s internal journey by centering Ellen’s perspective in The Time of Man. As she endures the trials and tribulations of rural Kentucky life, Ellen’s voice develops from that of a hesitant child to a fully self-actualized woman who is assured in her role as both a family member and community builder. Accessing her internal consciousness allows Roberts to articulate the rich internal life of a young girl and then woman who may not otherwise be featured in the American literary canon. In perfectly modernist fashion, Roberts encapsulates the complexity of emerging consciousness through the gradual development of Ellen’s inner voice. Victor A. Kramer examines this rich development in “Through Language to Self: Ellen’s Journey in The Time of Man.” Ellen’s world, and that of the reader, slowly expands across the narrative as she begins to acquire new language to describe her experiences, emotions, and the social-physical landscape of her world within the bounds of her Kentucky locale. As Kramer explains, “Little by little, Ellen comes to know that she is life, but only in part will this knowledge ever be articulated through words. Ellen senses much of her life, Roberts imagines, as grain responds to the elements or animals react to their surroundings” (774-75). Ellen is not only fulfilled by language acquisition but also “[U]ltimately develops the awareness of the contemplative” that presents a lucid portrait of her deep introspective nature evolving as she grows into the responsibilities of womanhood (Kramer 775). This progressive evolution is distinctly different from those written by many male modernists who centralize heroic male experiences as universal. The narratives of the most canonical male modernists are often of near epic proportions in which their characters embark on a pursuit of near psychological warfare against one another. Alternatively, Roberts successfully balances features of life that are both specific to the time and place of Ellen’s upbringing and also generally perceptible as an experience shared by women raised in a male-dominated society. Gina Herring writes that “The traditional male critical emphasis on this ‘epic’ quality of Ellen’s journey[…]indicates a reluctance to find significant value in the rhythms and rituals of a woman’s life[…]Roberts’ emphasis on the psychological drama of an ordinary woman shares in the sensibilities of 19th-century American regionalists who depicted a place, never mind the exact physical locale, called ‘woman’s sphere’” (Herring 197). The “woman’s sphere” in Ellen’s world consists of both the labor she participates in and the inner life she maintains in the private space of her personal monologue. Her deep reflectiveness and sentimentality is perhaps best exemplified in this passage;
As she sewed at some garment, rocking softly to and fro with the sway of her needle, she stopped, the seam stayed and the thread taut in her hand, stopped and remembered life… A sense of happiness surged over her and engulfed her thinking until she floated in a tide of sense and could not divide herself from the flood and could not now restore the memory of the clear fine image, gone in its own accompanying joy. The joy exhausted, she sat lax in an apathy, unthinking and unfeeling, staring at the wall without sight, but her hands remembered their habit of the needle and the stitches fell again, over and over, her body swaying softly to and fro. (382-3)
The simultaneous nature of Ellen’s emotional awareness as inseparable from her physicality is what defines her three-dimensional characterization beyond just a daughter, mother, or friend. She is whole, no longer dependent on her relationships with others to actualize her life. Nonetheless, she is a thread that keeps her family unit and greater Kentucky community intact. This interconnectedness is of immense value to Ellen and the others in her social circle—the unions which ground her are neither burdensome nor tedious but instead the meaningful stuff of a full life.
Unlike the individualism that is centered in the writing of many male modernists, Cather and Roberts’ shared focus is the collective freedom and fulfillment that comes after hard labor. In both novels the main female characters find satisfaction in working towards communal goals of living a stable and bountiful life of simple pleasures. Janet M. Labrie writes to this point in “The Depiction of Women’s Field Work in Rural Fiction” while discussing the community-minded farm women who actively participate in the economies of their locale. Labrie explains, “[T]he actions of these fictional farming women…offer a critique of male individualism. Although these women are successful farm cultivators, they do not work the farm alone or solely for themselves[…]Female farmers are consistently presented by their authors as devoted both to their task and to the land…They feel respect for the land as well as oneness with it” (131). Oftentimes, in modernist texts, characters (frequently male expatriates) are transient figures with no stake in the well-being of a particular community. In contrast, the women represented in Cather and Roberts’ narratives do not see themselves as separate entities from the place in which they live. Their hands are in the earth, as are their spirits and hearts. The privilege of these untethered and unencumbered men is in their ability to consume the world without limitations and to traipse about in pursuit of a greater artistic self. For Ántonia and Ellen, privilege is growing fully into one’s consciousness and constructing a safe and comforting home from which they can reflect on all that has been accomplished in a day, a week, or a lifetime of labor.
Cather and Roberts are two examples of authors who have been eclipsed by the false notion that women’s writing is about small, uncomplicated happenings in the domestic sphere. My Ántonia and The Time of Man are epic testaments to the rich interiority of women who have long been forgotten in historical and literary narratives about the plight of the human condition. Offering these two writers as mainstays in the modernist movement demands a reevaluation of a tradition that too often sideline women in their tales or cannot appropriately represent the issues women face as uniquely oppressed, forgotten creatives in the real world. Both in their writing and in their restored legacies, Cather and Roberts provide contemporary readers a brief insight to the timeless issues of life as frontier women emerging into self–actualization and self–fulfillment. This is the ultimate purpose of modernism: to portray the endless pursuit of becoming fully human that transcends the bounds of any particular locale but is shaped by the relationships we build within ourselves, our communities, and with our planet.
Works Cited
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1994.
Faber, Becky. “Women Writing about Farm Women.” Great Plains Quarterly (1998): 113-126.
Herring, Gina. “The Feminine Mystique and Elizabeth Madox Roberts.” Appalachian Journal (2001): 188-203.
Kramer, Victor A. “Through Language to Self: Ellen’s Journey in” The Time of Man”.” The Southern Review 20.4 (1984): 774.
Labrie, Janet M. “The depiction of women’s field work in rural fiction.” Agricultural history 67.2 (1993): 119-133.
Morley, Catherine. Modern American Literature, Edinburgh University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newpaltz-ebooks/detail.action?docID=951330.
Roberts, Elizabeth Madox. The Time of Man: A Novel. University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
Yukman, Claudia. “Frontier Relationships in Willa Cather’s” My Ántonia”.” Pacific Coast Philology (1988): 94-105.