Ellen Glasgow, "Barren Ground"
In the 1996 article, Heroism and tragedy: the rise of the redneck in Glasgow's fiction, Duane Carr speaks of Ellen Glasgow as a transitional author entrapped by ideals of the traditional and the modern. Carr's stated thesis is associated with Glasgow's character as a person as well as an author.
Ellen Glasgow was an advocate of progress and a modern South where reality would tear away fantasy and science would bring economic benefits to the lives of impoverished people. At the same time, her ties to the romance of the Old South were strong, and therein lies the major conflict in her novels. She was never quite to work out a satisfactory compromise.
(Carr, 1996)
Carr contends that through her dichotomous background, with two very different parents Glasgow could not help but represent a dichotomy in her character san her works. "She seems to be the quintessential Southerner, seeking valiantly to hold onto the old while embracing the new, never fully acknowledging that a belief in one might well preclude a belief in the other." (Carr, 1996)
Carr is critical of Glasgow in her early works for failing to fully develop characters. He argues that she assumes that a character does not have complex emotions simply because he or she cannot express them.
Glasgow makes the same mistake many writers before and since have made, and that is to assume that the inability to express complex emotions means the person does not have complex emotions. What she hasn't realized is that complex language comes to us through education or from having grown up among educated people. Failure to realize this has caused more than one writer to create flat characters, and Ellen Glasgow is no exception. (Carr, 1996)
Yet, in Barren Ground he gives her credit for one well developed character, that of Dorinda Oakley. Carr asserts that through Glasgow's own admission...
Through the assessment Carr gives Dorinda the only positive mark of completeness that is offered in his work and yet somehow dismisses this because Glasgow expresses her personal connection with the girl as a liberator.
Glasgow has written of Barren Ground (1925) that it is the novel she "might select... For the double-edged blessing of immortality" because of the principal character, Dorinda Oakley, who achieves universality because she "has learned to live without joy." Tying this theme to her own life and seemingly identifying with her character to a great extent, Glasgow wrote that the novel "became for me, while I was working upon it, almost a vehicle of liberation."...equally important to Dorinda's liberation as a woman is her liberation from a past that is tied -- through her father -- to the futility and despair of existence in poverty. Dorinda is perhaps the most fully realized of those Glasgow characters. (Carr, 1996)
Carr goes on to point out that the duality of Dorinda is reflected in the same duality that exists within Glasgow's heritage, though wealth may not be the issue the lack of vision that is present within those people, like her own father who cling to old traditional ideas often leads to impossible failures in life.
Carr goes on to describe the way in which the dichotomous marriagae produces children with divergent personal abilities. Each child inheriting better or worse character traits from one or the other parent, becoming a mirror of the parent if you will. It is clear that Dorinda and in this case Glasgow also prefers the character traits of her mother and disdains the simpleton and possibly stereotyped traits of her father. Joshua, the oldest son inherits the traits of the father and Dorinda and Rufus the more gentile character traits of her mother. Yet, to complete the character Dorinda's liberation…
