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A hunger for home: The life and art of Caroline Gordon. (Volumes I-III)
Abstract
Caroline Gordon's reputation is based in large part on misleading and inadequate portraits of her as a woman and writer, portraits resulting from Gordon's self-conscious posturing. Born in Kentucky in 1895, Gordon grew up in an extended family of strong women, yet in later life, she insisted that men had taught her everything. Although she wrote for newspapers in Tennessee and West Virginia between 1919 and 1924, Gordon later claimed that her education as a writer began when she married the poet Allen Tate and when she worked as a secretary for the novelist Ford Madox Ford. She also preferred to compare her writing to that of Henry James and other male artists. Over the years, scholars have accepted Gordon's perspective on her life and art. This dissertation is a biography revealing the private truth behind Gordon's posturing. Using unpublished manuscripts, letters, and interviews, I explore Gordon's early education as a storyteller, her work for the Chattanooga News and Wheeling Intelligencer, as well as her stormy marriage to Tate. I reveal how Gordon crafted a public myth in her life and art to obscure aspects of her personal history too unsettling for her to discuss, primarily Tate's infidelity and emotional instability. I explore how Gordon dramatized her family stories, especially the feud between the views of the Meriwethers, her maternal ancestors, and those of her father, J. M. Gordon. When Tate began to oppose the Meriwethers, demanding that Gordon abandon her family's stories to save their marriage, Gordon subsequently laced her fiction with situations explaining why she could not do so without destroying her marriage and herself. I also discuss Gordon's relationship to her female forebears, placing her fiction in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's literature. I trace her debts to women writers such as George Eliot and Amelie Rives, as well as the undercurrent of images and concerns in Gordon's novels which subvert her allegedly conservative values and messages. And I suggest that Gordon creates strong images of women who, however silent, often have the insight and responsibility necessary to save their husbands and lovers.
Subject Area
American literature|Biographies
Recommended Citation
Jonza, Nancylee Novell, "A hunger for home: The life and art of Caroline Gordon. (Volumes I-III)" (1990). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9035397.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9035397