• 1 As Richard Gray puts it, “the conflict is so fundamental, in fact, that it seems almost too pat, to (...)

1Like the generation of Southern writers who followed her, most notably Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow was “complexly ambivalent” in her attitude toward the South (D. Holman 87). “I had grown up in the yet lingering fragrance of the old South,” she wrote in A Certain Measure, “and I loved its imperishable charm, even while I revolted from its stranglehold on the intellect. Like the new South, I had inherited the tragic conflict of types” (12). She was, after all, born eight years after the Civil War in the heart of the former Confederacy: in a large house in Richmond, Virginia—the town where she was to spend most of her life. Glasgow’s mother, Anne Jane Gholson Glasgow, came from a family of jurists claiming descent from the early English settlers of Virginia. The evident contrast between her progenitors led Glasgow to experience what she called “a conflict of types,” in her autobiography The Woman Within (16). While her mother was the embodiment of the Southern lady, her father, Francis Thomas Glasgow, a successful businessman who operated the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond from 1849 to 1912, was a living embodiment of all those forces in the postwar South that were steadily transforming its economic and social structures. A descendant of Scottish Calvinists, he represented unbending authority and male power, mainly malevolent, as he combined Calvinist devotion with numerous sexual liaisons—often with the black servants of the house.¹ Certainly, the daughter learned from her mother about ancestral pride, the burden of the past and tradition—and, not least, about the sad story of decline. And what is more essential for the purposes of this article, in Ellen Glasgow’s eyes her mother represented the “curious fate of trying to be a Southern lady” (Gray 37): she had lived too much in terms of the burdens she had had to carry, and too little in terms of her own personal needs.

• 2 The myths of Southern romanticism as Glasgow interprets them are those ­male-created notions that a (...)

2Glasgow was aware that in the same instant that the Old South’s extinction after the Civil War was being lamented upon, a mythical South, which had died proudly at Appomattox without ever having been “smirched by the wear and tear of existence” (Gray 42), was being created. So if she became more interested than most other Southern writers in people who were, as she herself put it in The Woman Within, “unaware of the changes about them, clinging with passionate fidelity to the empty ceremonial forms of tradition” (193), it is hardly surprising. Those forms, and the conflicts they generated, were felt everywhere in postwar Virginia and the South in general: but they were felt with unusual intensity in the streets of the state and the region where she lived. As a spectator of the disintegration of the Old South, Glasgow’s first instinct was to quarrel with the myths of Southern romanticism, especially those revealing the patriarchal ­indoctrination of the South.²

• 3 Lucinda MacKethan describes Glasgow’s use and revision of the past as the idea of the “prodigal dau (...)
• 4 Glasgow’s novels are permeated with a sense of evil. Hugh Holman indicates that this sense of the b (...)

3Structural anthropology, in the tradition of Levi-Strauss or Barthes, reads myths as the expression of a narrative system, designating a level of symbolic or cultural connotation. Glasgow was one of the first Southern writers to challenge extensively the authenticity of the myth of the South and the ensuing patriarchal paradigm. She saw this myth as a collective effort of white male Southerners in power to establish and solidify a societal structure for their apparent benefit, by means of manipulating the other gender, race and classes into believing in the myth. This is in keeping with Roland Barthes’s notion of myth as a form of signification conditioned by ideology which can control and oppress (Mythologies). Against the public yearning, she wished for a different and better South, “not just the simple restoration of past values and mores some of her contemporaries wanted to undertake” (Niewiadowska-Flis 20), and so she bitterly criticized the values of the past.³ As Elizabeth Ammons puts it, Glasgow would write “unpretty, complicated, fierce fiction—not the delicate imaginings of a Lady, which she as the daughter of solid upper-middle-class Virginia parents had been raised to epitomize” (169). Along this line, all the archetypes of the classic story of decay of Southern culture, from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! are compacted in “Jordan’s End” (1923): the big house, the inbreeding, the madness, the Gothic quality. Glasgow, who was the first Southern writer to use the phrase “Southern gothic” in 1936 in an address she made to a group of librarians at the University of Virginia, uses such elements in “Jordan’s End” to suggest the harsh reality of life in the South, and to convey the idea that danger comes from within, as if, as Brigitte Zaugg has put it, “some invisible canker were gnawing at the South’s entrails and killing it by degrees” (134).⁴ And such danger, she ­acknowledged, was especially threatening to women. As one of the leading feminists of that era in the South, she wished to represent female ­experience in her novels. The “tenaciousness of Glasgow’s wish to free women from bondage and her frustration with male supremacy” cannot be denied (Niewiadowska-Flis 14)—she herself claimed: “I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence” (Woman 163); yet often her feminism became, however unwillingly, tinted with romanticism and sentimentalism.

• 5 The Fates are usually conceived as three female deities who supervise fate rather than determine it (...)

6According to Sophocles, who makes use of the most common form of the legend in his play (442-441 BC), Antigone was the product of the ­incestuous marriage between King Oedipus of Thebes and his mother Jocasta. In his version, Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices, agreed to alternate rule each year, but when Eteocles decided not to share power with his brother after his tenure was expired, Polynices gathered an army and attacked the city of Thebes in a conflict called the “Seven against Thebes.” The Thebans won the war, but both sons of Oedipus were killed, leaving their uncle Creon as ruler once more, serving as regent for Laodamas, the son of Eteocles. Creon gives Eteocles a full and honorable burial, but orders (under penalty of death) that Polynices’s corpse be left to rot on the ­battlefield as punishment for his treason. Antigone, who is betrothed to Creon’s son, Haemon, determines this to be unjust, immoral and against the laws of the gods, and defies him by burying her brother. After being found out, she is brought before Creon, to whom she declares that she knew the royal law but chose to break it, expounding upon the superiority of ‘divine law’ to that made by man, and is condemned to be entombed alive in her ancestors’s mausoleum as punishment. Sophocles’s “Antigone” ends in utter disaster, even though Creon finally relents after Tiresias tells him to bury the body. When Creon arrives at the tomb, Antigone has already hanged herself, and his son, Haemon, ends up taking his own life. Queen Eurydice, King Creon’s wife, also kills herself at the end of the story due to seeing such actions allowed by her husband; significantly, she had been forced to weave throughout the entire story and therefore, her death alludes to the Fates.⁵ Sophocles’s play directly alludes to the subjected position of women in patriarchy, as Antigone’s sister, Ismene, states toward the end of her opening intervention (at this point, Antigone is trying to convince her to bury their brother):

• 6 As many critics before have noted, charges of incest have historically been aimed at marginal or un (...)

7Like the Greek tragic figure, who defied King Creon by piteously burying Polynices, Judith Jordan questions the Southern moral order by her pious act of euthanasia toward her husband, who like previous ­generations, suffers from mysterious mental and physical ailments which are the result of inbreeding—a notion also present in Antigone’s myth, since she herself is the product of incest.⁶ It is essential to consider that, thrown back on the defensive after the Civil War, Virginia became a society living ­perpetually in the shadow of the Civil War, a society oppressively fanatical when dealing with contemporary problems, obsessed by principle, and rapidly suspicious of ideas other than its own. “Jordan’s End” broaches an ethical question, that of euthanasia or beneficent death, which is one of those intolerable themes that runs like an unmentionable current through much writing—it is suggested, for instance, in the ending of Absalom, Absalom! And by associating such an act to the character of Judith, Glasgow defines the new Southern woman as she sees her: independent, self-willed, with the virtues of fortitude and endurance, with that Calvinist “vein of iron” that Glasgow would emphasize in the character of her later female protagonists—especially Dorinda Oakley in Barren Ground (1925) and Ada Fincastle in Vein of Iron (1935). Judith’s act of euthanasia responds to her wish to ­liberate her husband—death becomes a positive alternative to a life of suffering, which recalls Antigone’s words when facing her punishment:

• 7 Many thanks to Dr. Emmanuel Verdanakis for pointing this out during the ­presentation of a version (...)

8But ultimately Judith, like her Biblical namesake, kills the man who had a claim on her. In the Old Testament, Judith saved the city of Bethulia from the Assyrians besieging it by beheading their chief, Holofernes. He had invited her to share his meal and he drank the strong wine she had brought; once he had fallen into a stupor she drew his sword and cut off his head. In Glasgow’s story, Judith presumably kills her husband by making him drink too strong a dose of the opiate—actually the whole phial—the doctor had given her. The subtext is complexly ambivalent, as biblical Judith functions as an instrument of the patriarchal system who eventually kills the man who was bound to subject her.⁷

• 8 Pamela Matthews explains Glasgow’s defiance of the patriarchal order in terms of writing: “To write (...)

9So, if like Judith, the Southern lady and her adolescent counterpart, the southern belle, rebelliously challenged the assumptions of patriarchy and departed from the domestic ideal, her defiance would have ­implications extending beyond her own existence: women who “asked for greater scope for [their] gifts [than domesticity] … were tampering with society, ­undermining civilization” (Welter 172). Thus, women apparently had two options: either accept the myth as a viable option for their lives, and in so doing deface their real selves, or reject deference to the patriarch, which translated into social oblivion. But in fact, there is a third option: silence, and no less effective: rebellion. In “Jordan’s End,” Glasgow appears to defy genteel traditions and subvert the situation in which Southern women are unable to redefine their roles, for she knew that if Southern women ­continued to acquiesce in having their lives shaped, limited and crippled by patriarchs, “they would never find the strength and courage to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchal oppression” (Niewiadowska-Flis 107).⁸

• 9 The expression Angel in the House is taken from the title of a 1854 narrative poem by Coventry Patm (...)

10However, even though Judith defies this patriarchal order by not adhering to the alleged morality expected of a Southern lady, at the very same time that she is likened to the Greek heroine, she is forced into the oppressive mythical ideal of the Angel in the House.⁹ She appears distanced, idealized, on a pedestal to the eyes of the narrator:

• 10 Both “Dare’s Gift” and “Jordan’s End” are set in symbolic country houses that exert a moral influen (...)

11As in “Dare’s Gift” (1917), Glasgow uses a male narrator as a reminder of women’s entrapment in male narratives that endorse male entitlement within the patriarchal system.¹⁰ Judith, despite her “unconventional”, ­transgressing acts, is placed on the pedestal by a male narrative voice that idealizes her from their very first encounter, with echoes of Platonism—regarding her utter perfection—and Renaissance canons of beauty:

• 12 As Peggy Prenshaw notes, Glasgow would create characters who exposed “the ­psychological injuries i (...)

14In her rewriting of the myth of Antigone, Glasgow exposes, via Judith, the psychological injuries imposed by such a rigid society, as her most positive, life-affirming action remains an act of rebellion.¹² The patriarchal paradigm still silences and imprisons women within male-created models of femininity that do not allow for self-definition and independence; and transgressing such models is out of the question, as the story suggests. There is no room for rebellious Antigones in the old South of moonlight and magnolias: they threaten the stability of the oppressive myth created by white male Southerners to solidify a societal structure for their apparent benefit. Nevertheless, I cannot but think that in Judith is the sketch of the woman that Glasgow casts in her masterpiece Barren Ground (1925) as the figure best able to assuage the anxieties of the developing New South. If life is difficult to endure, Ellen Glasgow insisted that the pioneers and their descendants had the “vein of iron” she described in Dorinda Oakley to meet its sometimes unexpected and inexplicable demands; they possessed “moral integrity, self-reliance, devotion to a cause of their own or of God’s ­formulation, endurance, and fortitude” (McDowell 205). At the end of “Jordan’s End,” before bidding farewell to the narrator, Judith ­acknowledges that she will remain where she has suffered and endured. She is tied to the land and what it represents, but like Dorinda, she will face her plight with stoic endurance: