Vein of Iron by Ellen Glasgow

First published: 1935

Type of plot: Family chronicle

Time of work: 1900-1935

Locale: Ironside and Queenborough, Virginia

Principal Characters:

• Ada Fincastle, the protagonist
• John Fincastle, Ada’s father, America’s greatest living philosopher
• Grandmother Fincastle, John’s mother
• Meggie Fincastle, John’s unmarried sister
• Mary Evelyn Fincastle, Ada’s mother
• Ralph McBride, eventually Ada’s husband

The Novel

Ellen Glasgow divides Vein of Iron into five parts: “Toward Life,” “The Single Heart,” “Life’s Interlude,” “God’s Mountain,” and “The Dying Age.” In the first three parts, Ada Fincastle moves toward union with Ralph McBride. That union is achieved in part 3, though the couple does not marry until Ralph returns from World War I early in part 5. Meanwhile, the family leaves the Manse, their ancestral home in the mountain village of Ironside. She and Ralph begin their married life in metropolitan Queenborough. In part 5, they struggle to return to their beloved home. This return is achieved in the last chapter.

Part 1, “Toward Life,” tells, through multiple centers of consciousness, the story of one December day when Ada is ten. The novel begins with Ada’s experiences of that day when she expected her father to bring her a doll with real hair. She has saved her money, and she is acutely aware that she will soon be too old to enjoy dolls. Unfortunately, her father is unable to bring her such a doll. Though she is extremely disappointed, she is able, thanks to the strength of the family which understands her and cares for her, to accept the substitute doll.

Other incidents in Ada’s life that day, as well as looks into the consciousnesses of her grandmother, aunt, father, and mother, reveal the qualities which sustain Ada through this disappointment and which sustain her and her family through the vicissitudes of their lives. Ada is characterized by imaginative sympathy: She is able to imagine herself inside others and to feel their pain and their moral qualities. She also has a strong will. The qualities of the family which sustain her include her mother’s appreciation of beauty and small comforts, her father’s intellectual integrity, her aunt’s unfailing and uncomplaining service to the material needs of the family, and her grandmother’s pride in the family history, a history of pioneer men and women who have overcome great difficulties to live good and happy lives.

The family’s life is difficult, largely because John Fincastle has given up a promising career as a Presbyterian minister to write philosophy. He has chosen to approach God through reason, and as a result, he has been expelled from the ministry. Hence, the family is chronically short of money. They live reasonably well because each family member works so hard to provide the necessities of life. John earns a little money teaching a small school in his home but spends as much of his time as he can on his monumental work of philosophy. His work goes unrecognized in America, though it is appreciated by important European thinkers. John’s wife, Mary Evelyn, approves of and defends his choice of life even though it deprives her of many of the comforts to which she was accustomed in her youth, and even though this rough life leads to her premature death. John’s sister, Meggie, though she disapproves of John’s decision, puts family love above her religious beliefs. Grandmother Fincastle, though she fears that her son is damned for his heresy, loves and cares for him with all of her formidable energy. Despite disagreements and tensions in a family of strong Presbyterian conviction, the essential “vein of iron” holds them together.

Defining this vein of iron is a complex task, for it includes physical strength, the family’s sense of its history, a kind of willfulness in favor of what seems right, and an unflagging loyalty to one another and to the family as a whole. It is that quality which no Fincastle will give up. At its center is love. John and Mary Evelyn know what it has cost them for John to write his book, but Mary Evelyn would never have asked John to give it up merely for her comfort. This same sort of love compensates Ada for her disappointment over the doll.

In part 2, “The Single Heart,” twenty-year-old Ada suffers the two great losses of her life. First, she is separated from Ralph McBride when he is trapped into marriage with Janet Rowan. This marriage lasts for six years until the discontented Janet finds a wealthier husband. In the meantime, Ada suffers her second great loss when her mother dies. Then, in 1918, just before Ralph goes to war, Ada and Ralph decide to spend his last leave together even though he is still married.

Part 3, “Life’s Interlude,” records Ada’s supreme happiness, as she thinks, when she spends two days with Ralph on Thunder Mountain. She believes that she is wresting this happiness from an uncaring God and a jealous society. Later she sees her act more clearly, but she never regrets it.

In part 4, “God’s Mountain,” Ada bears Ralph’s son while he is serving in Europe, Grandmother Fincastle dies, and the family moves to the large town of Queenborough. Ada’s sin is another test of the family’s strength, parallel to John’s leaving the ministry. Because Ada will not repent, Grandmother seems unable to forgive her, but in fact, Grandmother fears that Ada will be damned. When the child is born, Grandmother comes to Ada’s aid, comforting and sustaining her as always, but after the birth of the child, Grandmother quickly declines and dies. Ada feels responsible for the death of her beloved Grandmother. Yet Ada discovers that her Grandmother lives on in her thoughts. She is especially aware of echoing Grandmother’s judgments about weak characters and of seeking strength in Grandmother’s stories of the strongest of her female ancestors.

Part 5, “The Dying Age,” shows the family in Queenborough after the war. Ralph returns to marry Ada, and they prosper in the 1920’s. Their home, with John and Meggie, on Mulberry Street becomes part of a new village. Ralph, however, has been made cynical by the tendency toward self-hatred bred into him by his mother, by his early separation from Ada and his forced marriage to the amoral Janet, and by his experience of senseless carnage in the war. Ada’s loving strength supports him, but there is always a tendency to give way to a self-destructive despair. This tendency leads to an automobile accident in which he suffers temporary paralysis. His recovery uses up what the family had saved to return to Ironside and coincides with the beginning of the Great Depression. Ada’s strength and the strength and integrity of the Fincastles bring their family closer together as their world crumbles around them. When they reach the end of their resources, and after John has finished his great work, John realizes that he is about to die. To save the family the high cost of burying him in Queenborough, he holds his failing body together long enough to travel to Ironside and to die in front of his home. Enough of his life insurance remains for Ada and Ralph to buy back the old house and to begin again as their ancestors did in this valley.

The Characters

Glasgow’s characterizations in Vein of Iron are rich and detailed. A special feature of characterization is Glasgow’s portrayal of the family’s shared consciousness. This consciousness is a shared history which seems to divide into masculine and feminine versions. In the men, there has been a hunger for wisdom and the freedom in which to pursue it. This hunger has appeared in their tradition of dissent which carried them from Scotland, to Ireland, to America, and finally to Ironside. In the women, there has been a steady refusal to surrender to the forces of chaos. They decline to accept defeat by war, disaster, and disease; they draw strength from their past, and they project their family toward life. This sense of a sustaining wholeness in a family determined to continue into the future and dedicated to the pursuit of something beyond life is richly captured and portrayed by Glasgow, especially in part 1. These forces come to a focus in Ada. She makes a whole and happy life in the chaos of “the dying age” because of her sense of belonging to and continuing this way of living which transcends social and political forms.

John is an important foil to Ada. He has chosen to pursue God through reason, but he realizes that God may be pursued just as validly through the emotions. In fact, he recognizes that the central cause of his pursuit is a passion, a hunger to know. In the context of John’s scholarship, Ada’s search for happiness becomes, also, a search for God. Both find their searches fulfilled repeatedly in various forms in the very process of searching. Both characters repeatedly come to moments in their lives when they are able to affirm that despite much pain, they have been happy and they are happy at the moment.

Critical Context

In The Woman Within (1954), her autobiography, Glasgow includes Vein of Iron with Barren Ground (1925), The Sheltered Life (1932), and two other novels on the list of works that she thinks are her best. Her second-to-last published novel, Vein of Iron was well received both by the critics, who praised it, and by the public which bought many copies.

Critics writing after World War II have disagreed about the novel’s quality, some seeing it as a solid, if less impressive return to the themes of Barren Ground, others seeing it as declining toward a facile didacticism. Both views are justified to some extent. There are, for example, a few somewhat clumsily contrived conversations and incidents near the end of the novel which seem to be more direct comments on the irrationality of the Depression than contributions to the picture of spiritual chaos in which the Fincastles must reforge their vein of iron. While these weaken the novel, it remains, nevertheless, a strong and moving work, dominated by interesting characters who earn the reader’s admiration.

Bibliography

Glasgow, Ellen. The Woman Within. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954. The author’s review of herself. A warm straightforward, introspective, and informative account that must be read by those who are seriously interested in Glasgow’s work. Includes an appendix that traces Glasgow’s family history and a useful index.

Goodman, Susan. Ellen Glasgow: A Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Supersedes the only previous biography, both in terms of providing new and more reliable information on Glasgow’s life and conveying sensitive intepretations of her fiction. Includes notes and bibliography.

Holman, C. Hugh. Three Modes of Southern Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966. An excellent treatment of Glasgow in company with William Faulkner (whom Glasgow detested) and Thomas Wolfe in the various contexts of Southern writing. Contains a bibliography and a useful index.

Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976. Offers ten essays about Glasgow and her work. Six of these were read at the Centennial Symposium honoring Glasgow at Mary Baldwin College and the Richmond Public Library in Virginia in 1973.

McDowell, Frederick P. W. Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960. The first book analyzing Glasgow’s writing. Still useful, offering insights into her writing within the context of her life story.

Raper, Julius Rowan. From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. An outstanding, well-written analysis of Glasgow’s fiction from 1916 to 1945 by a Glasgow specialist. Probes the emotional core of her writing and the influences of modern social psychology on the creation of her characters. Chapter 9 deals in detail with Vein of Iron. Contains a good bibliography and an index.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. No Place on Earth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959. This excellent commentary on Glasgow and her fellow novelist and friend James Branch Cabell is intended to indicate their places in cultural and literary history. Includes footnotes.

Scura, Dorothy M., ed. Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Detailed essays on Glasgow’s major novels and themes, two essays on her autobiographies, and two essays on her poetry and short stories. Includes a helpful overview in the introduction and a bibliography.

Thiébaux, Marcelle. Ellen Glasgow. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982. Thiébaux offers extensive discussions of Glasgow’s works but provides only a short biography which stresses Glasgow’s divided personality and the pain that this caused her. Includes a good bibliography.