“Finished with All That”: The Death of the Southern Lady and the Emergence of the New Woman in Ellen Glasgow’s Fiction

<p>Na przestrzeni lat Ellen Glasgow uczyniła z życia kobiet temat wielu powieści. Przyjmując perspektywę <em>gender studies</em>, w artykule zaproponowano porównanie różnych modeli kobiecości na przykładzie głównych bohaterek trzech powieści z trzech epok: <em>The Battle-Ground</em> (1902), <em>Virginia</em> (1913) i <em>Barren Ground</em> (1925). Opracowanie przedstawia ewolucję kreacji kobiecych od konserwatywnego modelu kobiety z Południa do postępowego modelu nowej kobiety. Interakcja tych bohaterek z różnymi patriarchalnymi instytucjami, a także jej wynik, potwierdza wyższość modelu nowej kobiety nad modelemkobiety z Południa i przedstawia przejście Glasgow pod względem gatunkowym od powieści sentymentalnej do realistycznej.</p>

Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life: “The Betrayals of Life” in the Crumbling Aristocratic South

Ellen Glasgow’s works have received, over time, a mixed interpretation, from sentimental and conventional, to rebellious and insightful. Her novel In This Our Life (1941) allows the reader to have a glimpse of the early twentieth-century South, changed by the industrial revolution, desperately clinging to dead codes, despairing and struggling to survive. The South is reflected through the problems of a family, its sentimentality and vulnerability, but also its cruelty, pretensions, masks and selfishness, trying to find happiness and meaning in a world of traditions and codes that seem powerless in the face of progress. The novel, apparently simple and reduced in scope, offers, in fact, a deep insight into various issues, from complicated family relationships, gender pressures, racial inequality to psychological dilemmas, frustration or utter despair. The article’s aim is to depict, through this novel, one facet of the American South, the “aristocratic” South of belles and cavaliers, an illusory representation indeed, but so deeply rooted in the world’s imagination. Ellen Glasgow is one of the best choices in this direction: an aristocratic woman but also a keen and profound writer, and, most of all, a writer who loved the South deeply, even if she exposed its flaws.

Women Who Will—Do

“Women Who Will—Do” catalogues the nonfiction writings by Ellen Glasgow and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings that detail their shared interest in social activism. Many of these writings were included in the material collected by Rawlings for the Glasgow biography or shared in correspondences between the two women writers. This chapter focuses on Rawlings’s interest in conservationism and Glasgow’s work with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Both women found ways to use their fame and wealth to influence others about the social issues they supported.