Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley

First published: 1923

Type of plot: Naturalism

Time of work: Early twentieth century, from approximately 1910 to the 1940’s

Locale: Rural Kentucky

Principal Characters:

• Judith Pippinger Blackford, the protagonist, a vivacious woman, the daughter and then the wife of a sharecropper and the mother of three children
• Jerry Blackford, her sharecropper husband
• Lizzie May Pippinger Pooler, her older sister, the “ideal” wife, mother, and rural homemaker
• Dan Pooler, Lizzie May’s sharecropper husband
• Luella Pippinger, Lizzie May’s less attractive fraternal twin, a spinster
• Luke Wolf, and
• Hat Wolf, a crude sharecropping couple, Judith and Jerry’s closest neighbors
• The revivalist, a charismatic, fiery-eyed traveling preacher, Judith’s lover for a few months.
• Jabez Moorhouse, an idiosyncratic loner, Judith’s “double” who is twenty years her senior, the Thoreau of the tobacco fields

The Novel

Much of Weeds is filtered through the experience and perception of Judith Pippinger, an unusually alive and exuberant offspring of impoverished, backwoods Kentucky, the product of inbreeding, malnutrition, geographical isolation, and poverty, a dark red rose blooming “against the drabness of the dooryard, now bare with summer draught. . . . Gorgeously it flaunted on its distorted stem.” The novel follows her from young, eccentric girlhood, when she is a dark-haired, unruly sprite among pale, long-faced, listless children, to young adulthood, to middle age and old age.

As a young girl, she follows her father around, helping with the outdoor chores—the milking, the cleaning of the pigsty, and the feeding of the chickens—rather than be trapped indoors helping her mother and sisters cook, clean, sew, mend, and tend to the needs of the male children. At a young age, she finds solace in the beauty of nature, the colors of the sky, the shapes of the hills. The book is structured chronologically, tracing Judith’s coming of age, while it also rigorously follows the cycle of seasons, just as the seasons dictate the fortunes of the sharecroppers.

When Judith is twelve years old, her mother dies of a cold. Attended by her older sisters in their starched and patched aprons, the piercing winds of February blowing through the chinks in the two-room shack, Annie Pippinger leaves her husband and five children, the cupboards bare except for cornmeal and a bit of sowbelly, the apples and potatoes gone with her. “The mouse-like little woman was claiming more attention now than she had ever done in all the forty-odd years of her drab existence.” Dismally, the family carries on, but as spring follows winter, the family manages, seasons pass, and Lizzie May, Luella, and Judith come of courting age. First Lizzie May, who is pretty in a bleak, blonde, pinched way, is selected. Then it is Judith’s turn. A young man named Jerry Blackford courts her by meeting her while she gathers the calves at nightfall, stealing her away from a young buck in his father’s horse and buggy. “It was all that easy for Jerry. It was a speedy, simple, natural courting, like the coming together of two young wild things in the woods. Jerry, who was of a practical turn of mind, immediately began to plan for their future.”

Judith slowly transforms from “the on’y woman . . . that’s got a man’s ways,” to a young wife, to a mother of one, then two, then three. Now she, too, has an uninsulated, two-room shack of her own, heated in the dead of winter by the fire of a potbellied stove. At first, Judith helps Jerry in the tobacco fields, planting and then laboriously topping the plants, then stripping and bundling, from four in the morning to seven at night. After the babies come, she is relegated to the inside, doing the housework and the child rearing that she is temperamentally unsuited to do. Slowly, her life encircles and enslaves her. She lives in a gray tedium, alienated from her husband and from the other sharecroppers’ wives, who find compensation and even joy in their impoverished, dismal lives: Lizzie May in her rag rugs and her clean children, Hat Wolf in her catalog finery and her The Homemaker’s Companion. Jabez Moorhouse, Judith’s spiritual double, a man able to appreciate the sound of a fiddle, the healing quality of nature, and the sight, smell, and feel of the land, has known her all her life. He says to her, a woman grown old at thirty after three babies, an attempted abortion, a miscarriage, a short-lived affair, the death of more loved ones, failed crops, low tobacco prices, and pervasive poverty: “It makes me feel bad, Judy, to see you go like all the rest of us, you that growed up so strong an’ handsome, so full o’ life an’ spirits. I’ve watched you sence you was a baby growin’ like a pink rosebud, an’ then blossomin’, so beautiful to see. And now. . . .”

After their baby, Annie, survives the flu which has taken the lives of many others, Judith reconciles with her husband, from whom she has been emotionally estranged, and with her narrow life: “She was through with struggle and question, since for her nothing could ever come of them but discord. . . . She would go on for her allotted time bearing and nursing. . . . And when her time of child bearing was over she would go back to the field, like the other women. . . .” Yet on the last pages of the novel, which seemed to be ending in reconciliation and accommodation, Judith hears of Jabez’s death and “what light and color had remained for her in life faded out. . . .” Her soul mate gone, she is left, the “natural” woman, bound to her husband and children, tied to the land that they will never own and the meager cycle of existence wrested from it. Thus, the novel ends with the fire in her soul extinguished.

The Characters

Judith Pippinger Blackford is a prototype of the working-class heroine later used by Agnes Smedley in Daughter of Earth (1929) and Harriette Arnow in The Dollmaker (1954). She is a fully realized character caught in constricting circumstances, portrayed, for the most part, neither sentimentally nor heroically. She can be likened, to a great extent, to the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945). She is interesting not only in her love of the outdoors and her affinity for “man’s work,” but also in her forthright sexuality. She is sexually intimate with Jerry before they are married. “Accident was kind to them and did not thrust upon them with untimely speed the physical results of the sweet intimacy that they enjoyed.” In like manner, when she finds herself strongly attracted to a traveling revivalist, she risks scandal and ostracism and has an affair with him. Unlike Emma Bovary, she realizes that he is not a permanent solution to her dreary existence, awakens from “the dream,” and ends it.

Without the author laying the blame on her husband, Judith is depicted as becoming cynical with her role as sharecropper’s wife and a mother; her affections harden toward her family. So disenchanted does she become with her lot in life that she wonders if her daughter’s life is worth saving. “She would live only to endure, to be patient, to work, to suffer; and at last, when she had gone through all these things, to die without ever having lived and without knowing that she had never lived.” When her daughter survives the flu, she attempts to come to terms with her life, to accept it without chafing, but when her spiritual double, Jabez Moorhouse, dies, she realizes that this “peaceful resignation” is also a dream dissipated at the question: “Whatcha got for supper, Judy?” At the novel’s end, she is Sisyphus rolling the rock to the top of the mountain, knowing it will roll back down, over and over again. Unlike Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, however, she is not ennobled by this consciousness of her condition; she cannot embrace the rock.

Her husband, Jerry Blackford, is portrayed sympathetically. A healthy, robust, well-meaning young man, he strives to make enough money from the unpredictable tobacco crop to buy his own land, the only way out of the poverty cycle of the tenant farmer. Like the other sharecroppers, he is unable to get ahead. After one particularly backbreaking season, during which he is detained two weeks by flu from getting the tobacco to market, the prices drop drastically and the harvest is a failure. “Suddenly he dropped to the floor beside her, and with his arms across her knees and his face laid upon his arms, broke into dry, convulsive sobs, harrowing to hear.”

Jerry is characterized by Judith’s sister Lizzie May as being a “good husband,” hardworking and not hard drinking. Marriage separates him from Judith rather than uniting them, but he seems too tired from his physical labor to notice and later is helpless to change it. He is an oblivious Sisyphus; like Judith, he is prematurely aged by hard work, malnutrition, and disappointment, but he continues to hope for the best. Unlike Judith or Jabez Moorhouse, he does not glimpse nor does he yearn for another dimension to his life.

Jabez Moorhouse is a farmer-philosopher-bon vivant. Though twenty years her senior, he shares with Judith a common aesthetic: a love of beauty, a hunger for life, and a tangible sensuality that those around them lack. He also perceives that his life as a sharecropper is a dead end: “I cud a made a preacher . . . or a congressman or a jedge or learnt to play the fiddle good if I’d only had a chanct. But all my life I hain’t done nothin’ but dig in dirt. An’ all the rest o’ my life I’m going to keep right on a-diggin’ in dirt.” To Judith one day he confesses: “You an’ me together, Judy, might a made sumpin out of our lives, anyway got in a little play along with the grind.” Jabez seems closest to Camus’s happy Sisyphus, the man conscious of his plight who is able, finally, to embrace it.

Hat and Luke Wolf and Lizzie May and Dan Pooler as couples serve as foils to Judith and Jerry Blackford. Early in the novel, neither of these couples seems to possess the “natural” love and affinity for each other that Judith and Jerry do, but later in the novel, their marriages prove to be stronger than the Blackfords’. Though both Dan and Luke are drunkards when they have the money, and though Luke is unspeakably stingy with the horsey, hardworking Hat, both couples are basically content with their lot as rural tenant farmers. They share a mutual complacency, one that Judith cannot share with Jerry. As the years roll by, this gap is widened. No amount of housekeeping, rug weaving, or reading of The Homemaker’s Companion can mask for Judith the fruitlessness of her existence. The satisfaction that Lizzie May experiences from keeping her home and children neat and clean, from the dirt floors covered with rag rugs, the windows curtained with a bit of store-brought frill, is not Judith’s. Nor does she, like Hat, endlessly complain of her lot, ferreting pennies away from her husband to send away for bits of dress material.

Luella Pippinger, Lizzie May’s fraternal twin and Judith’s older sister, is the resident spinster. For women in rural Kentucky, “spinsterhood” is an institution, the only alternative to marriage. Lightly sketched, docile to the point of near invisibility, she also serves as a foil to Judith and her plight.

The revivalist is never named. He is a dark-eyed force awakening and arousing Judith’s passion. She tires of him, finding him hypocritical and weak. Refreshingly, though she shares the fate of both Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter and Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary, she is not branded for life as is Hester, nor is she suicidal at the end of her romantic liaison as is Emma; it is Judith who tires of the relationship; it is Judith who severs it.

Critical Context

Though Weeds was favorably reviewed in 1923 (Sinclair Lewis, an old friend and former fiance being one of the reviewers), it never became popular. The book was revived in 1972 through the efforts of Matthew J. Bruccoli in his Lost American Fiction series under the auspices of the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale; Kelley’s selected papers are in a collection there, while her letters to Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair are in collections of the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana.

The reissuing of her novel brought her more critical attention, especially from the aspect of regionalism and feminism, but the novel has never become popular. Her second novel, The Devil’s Hand, about life in California’s Imperial Valley as seen through the eyes of two female protagonists, was written between 1925 and 1929. It was finally published in 1974, eighteen years after her death.

Her first novel garnered more critical acclaim than the second; neither was widely read. Nevertheless, Weeds has been called by many “a little masterpiece” of its type, a sensitively rendered and fully realized portrait of poor Southern life.

Both books are loosely autobiographical. Kelley was born in Ontario, Canada, and earned an honors degree in languages at the University of Toronto. She migrated to New York in 1905 and worked on Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary. In 1906, she became Upton Sinclair’s secretary and lived in Helicon Hall, a Socialist commune in Englewood, New Jersey. There she met and became engaged to Sinclair Lewis; though she married another man, they remained friends. After divorcing Alan Updengraff, she and her two children lived with sculptor Claude Fred Kelley, whose last name she assumed. From 1914 to 1945, they lived as tenant tobacco farmers in Kentucky, boardinghouse managers in New Jersey, and chicken farmers in California. Though both she and her husband were educated, they lived the life she describes in Weeds. They tried to make their living from the land while pursuing their art. The theme of human alienation from nature came naturally to Kelley, as did her portrayal of a woman and mother whose artistic soul is all but smothered by the harsh economic realities of her life.

Bibliography

Bradbury, John M. Renaissance in the South: A Critical History of the Literature, 1920-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. Bradbury presents a survey of the times and the context in which Kelley produced her novel.

Cook, Sylvia J. From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. Cook explores the theme of white Southern poverty in novels including Weeds.

Goodman, Charlotte. “Edith Summers Kelley.” In The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Goodman furnishes a biographical sketch of Kelley, a discussion of Weeds as a female Bildungsroman, and a brief bibliography for further study.

Goodman, Charlotte. “Widening Perspectives, Narrowing Possibilities: The Trapped Woman in Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds.” In Regionalism and the Female Imagination, edited by Emily Toth. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985. An analysis of Judith, the novel’s central character who must face the limitations imposed by poverty and gender.

Irvin, Helen. Women in Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979. Includes an analysis of Weeds.