Barren Ground by Ellen Glasgow

First published: 1925

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Rural Virginia

Principal characters

• Dorinda Oakley, the daughter of a poor white Virginia farmer
• Josiah and Rufus, her brothers
• Jason Greylock, the last member of an old Virginia family
• Geneva Ellgood, who becomes Jason’s wife
• Nathan Pedlar, a country farmer and merchant

The Story

Late one cold winter day, Dorinda Oakley walks the four miles between Pedlar’s Mill and her home at Old Farm. The land is bleak and desolate under a gray sky, and a few flakes of snow are falling. For almost a year, she worked in Nathan Pedlar’s store, taking the place of his consumptive wife. Her brisk walk carries her swiftly over the rutted roads toward her father’s unproductive farm and the dilapidated Oakley house. On the way, she passes Green Acres, the fertile farm of James Ellgood, and the run-down farm of Five Oaks, owned by the dissolute old Doctor Greylock, whose son, Jason, gave up his medical studies to take over his father’s practice and to care for his drunken father.

As she walks, Dorinda thinks of young Jason Greylock, who overtakes her in his buggy before she reaches Old Farm. During the ride to her home, she remembers the comment of old Matthew Fairlamb, who told her that she ought to marry Jason. The young doctor is handsome and represents something different from Dorinda’s drab, struggling life. Her father and mother and her two brothers are unresponsive and bitter people. Mrs. Oakley suffers from headaches and tries to forget them in a ceaseless activity of work. At Old Farm, supper is followed by prayers, prayers by sleep.

Dorinda continues to see Jason. Taking the money she is saving to buy a cow, she orders a pretty dress and a new hat to wear to church on Easter Sunday. Her Easter finery, however, brings her no happiness. Jason sits in church with the Ellgoods and their daughter, Geneva, and afterward, he goes home with them to dinner. Dorinda sits in her bedroom that afternoon and meditates on her unhappiness.

Later, Jason unexpectedly proposes, confessing that he, too, is lonely and unhappy. He speaks of his attachment to his father that brought him back to Pedlar’s Mill, and he curses the tenant system, which he says is ruining the South. He and Dorinda plan to be married in the fall. When they meet during the hot, dark nights that summer, he kisses her with half-angry, half-hungry violence.

Geneva, meanwhile, tells her friends that she is engaged to Jason. In September, Jason leaves for the city to buy surgical instruments. When he is overlong in returning, Dorinda begins to worry. At last she visits Aunt Mehitable Green, an old black conjuring woman, in the hope that she heard some gossip from the Greylock servants concerning Jason. While there, Dorinda becomes ill and learns that she is to have a child. Distressed, she goes to Five Oaks and confronts drunken old Dr. Greylock, who tells her, cackling with sly mirth, that Jason married Geneva in the city. The old man intimates that Jason is white-livered and was forced into the marriage by the Ellgoods. He adds, leering, that Jason and his bride are expected home that night.

On the way home, Dorinda, herself unseen, sees the carriage that brings Jason and Geneva to Five Oaks. Late that night, she goes to the Greylock house and tries to shoot Jason, who is frightened and begs for her pity and understanding. Despising him for his weakness and falseness, she blunders home through the darkness. Two days later, she packs her suitcase and leaves home. By accident, she takes the northbound train rather than the one to Richmond, and so changes the course of her life.

Dorinda arrives in New York in October, frightened, friendless, and with no prospects of work. Two weeks later, she meets a kindly middle-aged woman who takes her in and gives her the address of a dressmaker who might hire her. On the way to the shop, however, Dorinda is knocked down by a cab. She awakens in a hospital. Dr. Faraday, a surgeon who saw the accident, is able to save her life but not that of her baby. Dr. Faraday hires her to look after his office and children.

Dorinda lives in New York with the Faradays for two years. Then her father has a stroke, and she returns home. Her brother Josiah is married, and Mrs. Pedlar is dead. Dorinda is now a woman of self-confidence and poise. She sees Geneva, who already looks middle-aged, and has only pity for the woman who married Jason. Her brother Rufus says Jason is drinking heavily and losing all his patients. Five Oaks Farm looks more run-down than ever. Determined to make the Oakley land productive once more, Dorinda borrows enough money to buy seven cows. She finds Nathan Pedlar helpful in many ways, for he knows good farming methods and gives her advice. When she sees Jason again, she wonders how she could ever have given herself to such a husk of a man.

After Mr. Oakley’s death, Josiah and his wife Elvira go to live on their own land. Rufus, who hates the farm, wants to go to the city, but before he can leave, he is accused of murdering a neighboring farmer. Dorinda is convinced that he committed the murder, but Mrs. Oakley swears under oath that her son was at home with her at the time of the shooting. Her lie saves Rufus, but Mrs. Oakley’s conscience begins to torment her and she takes to her bed. Her mind broken, she lives in dreams of her youth. When she dies in her sleep, Dorinda weeps. It seems to her that her parents’ lives were futile and wasted.

During the next ten years, Dorinda works hard. She borrows more money to improve the farm and, although she saves and scrimps, she is happy. Geneva is losing her mind. One day she tells Dorinda that she bore a child but that Jason killed it and buried it in the garden. Geneva drowns herself the same day that Nathan asks Dorinda to marry him.

Together Dorinda and Nathan prosper. She is now thirty-eight and still feels young. John Abner Pedlar, Nathan’s crippled son, looks to her for help, and she gives it willingly. Nathan’s other children mean less to her, and she is glad when they marry and move away. When Five Oaks is offered for sale, Dorinda and Nathan buy it for six thousand dollars. As Jason signs over the papers to her, Dorinda notices that he is his dirty, drunken old father all over again.

Dorinda devotes the next few years to restoring Five Oaks. John Abner is still her friend and helper. There are reports that Jason is living in an old house in the pine woods and drinking heavily. Dorinda, busy with her house and dairy farm, has little time for neighborhood gossip. One day, Nathan takes the train to the city to have a tooth pulled and to attend a lawsuit. The train is wrecked, and Nathan is killed while trying to save the lives of the other passengers. He is given a hero’s funeral. The years following Nathan’s death are Dorinda’s happiest, for as time passes, she realizes that she regained, through her struggle with the land, her own integrity and self-respect.

One day, hunters find Jason sick and starving in the woods. Her neighbors assume that Dorinda will take him in. Unwillingly, she allows him to be brought to Old Farm, where she engages a nurse to look after him. In a few months, Jason dies. Many of the people at the funeral come only out of curiosity, and a pompous minister says meaningless things about Jason, whom he never knew. Dorinda feels nothing as she stands beside the grave, for her memories of Jason outlived her emotions. She senses that, for good or ill, the fervor and the fever of her life, too, are ended.

Bibliography

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