Abstract: During slightly more than twenty years of an active career, Gail Godwin has established herself as one of most gifted, prolific, and popular late twentieth-century Southern novelists. She has published eight substantial novels, two collections of short stories, numerous perceptive reviews of books by fellow writers, and several long essays setting forth connections between her life and writing. Indicating her increasing prestige within literary community are her long-time residence at artists' colony in Woodstock, New York, commendations of her work by such established authors as Joyce Carol Oates, John Fowles, and Kurt Vonnegut, and claims of reviewers that--in a typical though trite observation--she carries forward the Southern tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. (2) As Godwin herself has repeatedly said, much of her fiction is autobiographical in nature. Recognition of this fact is fundamental to an enlightened understanding of her novels. They are grounded in circumstances of her early life. Her mother and father were divorced shortly after she was born, and she was reared by her mother and grandmother; during her teens and young adulthood her mother remarried, in Godwin's eyes unhappily, and Godwin had unpleasant, embittering experiences with her stepfather. Also during this period, Godwin moved from two unsuccessful early marriages through insecurity and doubts about her abilities as an author to increasing confidence and success in her work (Godwin, Becoming a Writer 231-55; Xie 175-79). Drawing on these and related matters, Godwin in her fiction of early 1970s explores situation of trapped in unhappy marriages or love affairs: Dane Empson in The Perfectionists (1970), Francesca Bolt in Glass People (1972), Kitty Sparks and Jane Clifford in The Odd Woman (1973), and similar figures. In her later work, continuing to draw on personal experience, Godwin depicts, with ever surer hand, careers of independent, successful who are usually connected, as she is, with writing or arts. Among these are painter Violet Clay in Violet Clay (1978), actress Justin Stokes in The Finishing School (1985), and author Clare Campion in A Southern Family (1987). Aesthetically, Godwin has employed and mastered several established strains in literature, among them realism, fantasy, allegory, folktale, and myth, using personal experience as basis for excursions into highly imaginative material. Yet despite her achievements in literary art, unlike other postmodern writers like Anne Tyler, whom in range and productivity she resembles, Godwin has not yet been fully assimilated into Southern literary canons. In this essay I propose to examine briefly what I see as major reasons for her exclusion, and then to argue for her inclusion by looking at her dexterity in mode and technique, her sensitive portrayals of who struggle with kinds of problems she herself has had to contend with, and shifts in personal and social circumstances of various characters in her fiction that originate in difficulties caused by family, race, and class relationships in late twentieth-century South. The two main reasons for Godwin's exclusion from canon are probably her consistent appearance on best-seller lists, which undermines her claim to be considered a serious writer, and her feminism--or, perhaps more accurately, standard perception of how she handles feminist issues in her work. In regard to her popularity, situation may be generally described as follows. Because education in America has historically been domain of privileged classes, both makers of canons and so-called canonized authors have been suspicious of popular writers, particularly of popular writers--as, in different ways, Hawthorne's complaint about d--d mob of scribbling women and Thomas Wolfe's description of Gone With The Wind as an immortal piece of bilge make clear. …
Publication Year: 1995
Publication Date: 1995-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot