This beautiful novels follows the life of
protagonist Dorinda Oakley, a woman from very rural Virginia, for thirty
years. Dorinda, daughter of a land‐poor farmer in Virginia, at 20
goes to work in Nathan Pedlar's store. She falls in love with Jason Greylock,
weak‐willed son of
the village doctor, and forgets her purpose of helping her father to rebuild
the farm. However, the day before their
planned wedding Jason instead marries a former fiancée, later claiming that he
was forced to marry her. Bitterly disillusioned and pregnant, Dorinda seeks
work in New York, where she is injured and miscarries after being hit by a taxi.
She is attended by Dr. Faraday, who later employs her as a nurse for his
children.
Dorinda returns to the family farm as her father is
dying, finding the farm impoverished and overgrown with broomsedge. Having
studied scientific agriculture in New York, she introduces progressive methods,
gradually returning the “barren ground” to fertility and creating a prosperous
dairy farm. Her mother becomes an invalid, after her brother Rufus is questioned
for murder, so that Dorinda must carry on with only the aid of a few farm
laborers. After her mother's death she marries Nathan Pedlar, to provide a home
for his children. Though she doesn’t
love Nathan with the same romance with which he loves her, she has real respect
for Nathan which allows the two of them to have a rather stable and financially
successful marriage. Nathan, often
overlooked because of his lack of looks and quiet ways, dies a hero’s death
after rescuing people from a train accident.
After he dies she shelters Jason, now penniless and ill from excessive
drinking. He soon dies. The novel ends
with Dorinda taking to her own bed, echoing her own mother’s final admission of
exhaustion.
Throughout the novel, Dorinda struggles with desire
for happiness, contentment, and ease of mind: they seem to be
incompatible. After her young romance
with Jason which leaves her emotionally (and physically) scarred, Dorinda is
insistent on putting such sentimental nonsense behind her. This struggle between sentiment and
pragmatism is an overarching throughout the novel: not just in relationships
between people, but also in the relationship between people and the land. While Dorinda may (mostly) be able to keep
her feelings for other people outside the realm of the sentimental, her
attachment to the land and her family farm is another story. Certainly, the hard work which Dorinda
invests in her family farm does pay off, but also reveals what emotional
attachments are beyond her control. Even
the sections of the novel—“Broomsedge,” “Pine,” and “Life Everlasting”—are
plant names used as metaphors to illustrate Dorinda’s relationship to herself
and the land.
This is a beautifully written and moving novel. Pre-dating both Tobacco Road and Gone with
the Wind (and even Cold Mountain),
it seems to be to have been a strong influence on both of them. My only complaint is the rather uneven
treatment of race throughout. African
Americans throughout the novel are consistently characterized as an inferior
and lazy race, despite the outstanding individuals such as Fluvella, without
whose support Dorinda simply wouldn’t have survived. Compared to others in the novel, Dorinda’s
racism is perhaps a more benevolent form, but her failure to grasp the
real-life conditions of the African Americans on whose labor her own survival
depends is a weakness in an otherwise sensitive depiction of a life struggling
against rural poverty.
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