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Kirsten Steele
Randall Kenan
English 206
March 17, 2014
The Southern Woman: Selected Fiction by Elizabeth Spencer
Biographical Essay
Elizabeth Spencer is a Southern writer born in Carrollton, Mississippi in 1921 (“Elizabeth Spencer”). She published her first novel, Fire in the Morning, in 1948 and has published eight novels in total as well as a novella, Light in the Piazza (Spencer). The novella was adapted for the screen in 1962 and reimagined as a musical in 2005 (Spencer). Spencer’s most recent work is her short story collection A Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, published in 2004 (Spencer). Many have admired her work, including author Eudora Welty: “It has never been doubted that [she] knows the small, Southern backwoods hilltown down to the bone. This she transforms by the accuracy of her eye and ear, talent and a certain prankish gaiety of spirit into a vital and absorbing novel” (Spencer). Spencer’s spirit was captured in a documentary based on Spencer’s memoir, Landscapes of the Heart. The documentary was released in May 2013 and made appearances at various film festivals (Catfish Productions, LLC). Spencer herself has won numerous awards, including the William Faulkner Award for Literary Excellence in 2002 and the Thomas Wolfe Award for Literature in the same year (Spencer).
Spencer traveled to Italy in 1953 and there met her future husband, John Rusher (“Elizabeth Spencer”). He died in 1998. In a post on her website in September 2009, Spencer said, “Since my husband’s death…it has been difficult to find a steady focus for my writing” (Spencer). She continues to write and give readings (“Elizabeth Spencer”).
Works Cited
Catfish Productions LLC. Landscapes of the Heart: The Elizabeth Spencer Story. Web. 15
March 2014.
“Elizabeth Spencer: Author’s Bio.” Poets & Writers. Poets & Writers, March 2014. Web. 15
March 2014.
Spencer, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Spencer: writer. Web. 15 March 2014.
Summary Essay
In “The Adult Holiday,” the protagonist tiptoes around the house avoiding her husband after a confrontation. The five-page story traces its path and resolution, culminating in the father offering an opportunity for resolution through a comment to their child in his office. We see how he feels by the narrator’s description of his actions and by the words he speaks to their child. The child seems to be a way for them to resolve a deep-seated conflict through her attempts to understand her father’s words.
Elizabeth Spencer’s story “Sharon” tells the story of an old Civil War house named Sharon. The main character is the house; the narrator is a little girl, the niece of owner Uncle Hernan. He invites his niece to supper and she describes the intricacies of the house. These intricacies are further complicated by the presence of Melissa, a black woman who used to be the mistress’s nurse and housekeeper. We later discover that she and Hernan have a relationship that his niece seems to understand more deeply than any adult.
In “The Skater,” an older woman named Sara tries to navigate her way through her marriage, her affair and the case of a young man. The young man is a desperate client of her lawyer husband and she tries to assist him. The three men become entangled as she tries to help Goss. In the end Sara recognizes the lines of innocence she tried to preserve in the young man through her memories of skating.
Craft Analysis
“It was full of spring, all restlessness and sweet smells. It was radiant, it was warm, it was serene” (43). This line from “A Southern Landscape” displays Elizabeth Spencer’s skill with language. Her writing as a whole constantly tugs at the reader, inviting a deep understanding of how the South works as well as how people are on far more than a surface level. Her fresh perspective on both nature and character offers the reader a glimpse into the world of the South in stories like “A Southern Landscape,” “The Adult Holiday” and “Sharon.” This fresh perspective is not limited to the South, however, as she demonstrates in stories like “The Skater.” In this paper I will discuss how Spencer uses language, character, sense of place, point of view, dialogue and summation to pull in and hold the reader within the throes of her writing.
Language must be the greatest strength for Spencer in this reader’s mind. She finds creative ways to describe everyday occurrences, such as in “Sharon”: “When I remember that stillness, I hear again the little resistant veins of a dry oak leaf unlacing beneath my bare foot, so that the sound seems to be heard in the foot’s flesh itself” (87). The image of a leaf “unlacing” beneath one’s foot at first seems not to make sense; then, imagine the way a dry leaf unravels underfoot as the sole crunches it apart. It works in an extremely vivid way; had she not described the veins as “resistant,” then the image of “unlacing,” which connects to “undoing,” would have been incomplete. The image of veins is continued when she identifies the “foot’s flesh itself.” This continuation provides a sense of continuity and flow to the description.
Spencer also has beautiful language in describing emotion: “Later, she would think of East European mysteries when she thought of him, and know they had never found a really common language. Nothing in her experience gave him so much as a sentence to start with” (382). The language is not overly flowery or emotional but simple. She doesn’t use an abundance of metaphors or similes to get across her point but lets the information sit there; each sentence seems to have gentle, almost sweet tonethatheightens the poignancy.
Poignant too are the characters she gives the reader. They seem to be crafted in such a way that they are handed to the reader with a bow on top and an invitation to unpeel the wrapping paper. For example, the character of the child in “The Adult Holiday” acts as a perfect foil for the resolution of her parents’ conflict. She struggles to understand her father’s convoluted statement: “‘To be there I would have had to start going there the day your mother should have gone away’” (85). The child is then described as “caught in a tangle of syntax almost like an enchantment” (85). She tries to puzzle out her father’s confusing statement about her mother and it is perfectly believable and enchanting for a young child to do so. When the wife comes in and says she didn’t leave because she didn’t want to and the husband says he didn’t want her to leave either, the child is “greedy for happiness” and she “abandoned the puzzle of her father’s words forever” (86). The puzzle, the sentence, no longer matters because the relationship between her parents is more important. Her simple understanding of this as a child makes the story poignant and beautiful.
The idea of “simple” seems to resonate throughout Spencer’s work. She displays simplicity when she offers a strong sense of place in each story. It is certainly stronger in the stories about the South than the stories about the north. There is a certain flavor to the Southern stories exemplified through language like “It is a mighty asset to be a good cook” (91). This simple phrasing flavors the idea with a Southern drawl. In contrast, “The Skater” seems to focus more on the people and less on the sense of place. It seems almost sharp: “A cab took her far afield into a neighborhood of delicatessens and shoe repair, souvlaki restaurants and mini-lotto tickets” (377). While the place is firmly established, it has none of the soft edges that the Southern-drawl tinged “mighty asset” does.
Of course, the phrase “soft edges” does not necessarily connote softness in the stories. The choices in point of view that Spencer makes provide greater insight into even the characters whose thoughts we do not know, hardening them into nearly tangible people. Her use of first-person in “A Southern Landscape” rings true when Marilee describes driving out to the mansion Windsor with Foster:
What I should have done, I should have walked right off and left him there till doomsday…But I had to consider how things would look—I had my pride, after all. So I took a look around, hiked up my skirts and went down into the gully. (47)
This image of a woman going down into a gully to drag her drunken date out of the ditch is comical, to be sure, but Spencer’s use of first-person ensures that we as readers do not forget what was on the line for that character because it’s right there in a sweet Southern drawl for us to hear in our minds.
This is not to say that Spencer only uses first-person effectively. Her use of third-person in “The Skater” is wonderfully successful at still bringing the reader in close to the character. The narrator describes Sara’s dream this way: “in the dream she caught up, pulled the child around to face her, saw an ugly, coarse stranger who spit out icicles at her like a mouthful of teeth, while Sara cried, You stole that hat, and raised her hand to strike” (368). The simple description of a dream pulls us in to the character. We want her to find this innocence for which she seems so desperate; we cheer for her. The third-person seems to fit better in this case than first-person perspective because it seems distanced the way that Spencer has used it. That is, the distance Spencer puts into the third-person heightens our sense of the character’s distance from the red beret and her skating days. Spencer seems to have a honed sense for which perspective a story or a character requires.
This honed sense extends to dialogue. As with language, Spencer knows how to use dialogue to provide a little character depth or a little conflict at a time without making it the full focus of any of her stories. For example, in “Sharon,” the mother forbids the narrator from visiting Uncle Hernan. The narrator replies with “You just don’t like Melissa” (92). This statement holds in it not only defiance but also the recognition of racism in the mother from the daughter. That one line of dialogue provides the climax. Contrastingly, “The Skater” contains a great deal of dialogue. One section in particular offers a staccato rhythm that highlights the tension of Sara’s situation:
“Last night we pulled a long curl of mist in through the window. It refused to take a shape though.”
“That was after it rained. Does your husband wonder where you are?”
“I tell him it’s bridge night. He doesn’t play.”
“I thought lawyers liked bridge. Aren’t you ever at home?” (380)
Sara is the first one speaking and Goss is the second. The exchange draws out the tension of Sara’s vanilla-flavored marriage and the frankness of Goss’s character out into the open.
Spencer does a wonderful job of taking the tensions of relationships between her characters and summarizing them through simple, descriptive language. In “A Southern Landscape,” the last paragraph of the story summarizes the end of Marilee and Foster’s relationship:
Millions of things have happened; the war has come and gone. I live far away and everything changes, almost every day…it has become more and more important to me to know that Windsor is still right where it always was, standing pure in its decay…I earnestly feel, too, that Foster Hamilton should go right on drinking…I feel the need of a land, of a sure terrain, of a sort of permanent landscape of the heart. (50)
This summary takes the complex path of the relationship between these two characters and summarizes it well without leaving it too neat and clean. The pain of the narrator is still there, but it is dulled with time and the summary displays that quality. The summary offers a way out of the story without letting the character opt out of true feeling.
“True feeling” is probably a good a phrase as any to describe Elizabeth Spencer’s collection Southern Woman: Selected Fiction. Throughout all of her stories, she displays an affinity for simple, effective language and dialogue that establish her complex, real characters and a sense of place. She rounds out her stories with her choices in point of view and her use of summation. All of these elements are pulled into a lilting tone that lends a sweetness to reading her writing, which is without a doubt an enjoyable experience.
Works Cited
Spencer, Elizabeth. The Southern Woman: Selected Fiction. New York: Modern Library,
2009. Print.