Jordan's End by Ellen Glasgow

First published: 1923

Type of plot: Ghost story

Time of work: The 1890's

Locale: Virginia

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, a young doctor, called to Jordan's End to examine the master of the house
• Judith Yardly Jordan, the wife of Alan Jordan, mistress of Jordan's End
• Father Peterkin, a gnarled old man who helps his son sharecrop land on Jordan's End

The Story

As the story opens, the narrator, a young doctor beginning practice in an isolated section of Virginia near the turn of the century, is on his way to Jordan's End, a country estate at some remove from a small town. He has been sent for to examine Alan Jordan, the owner of the place. As he goes along in his horse and buggy, he encounters a fork in the road: One branch of its gives indications of having been well traveled; the other, deeply rutted but covered with grass and overhanging leaves, appears to have been little used. As he ponders which road to take, a voice from the bushes by the side of the main trail advises him to take the well-traveled road if he is going to the country store. Emerging from the woods, a stooped old man appears in the road, and when the doctor inquires the way to Jordan's End, the fellow points to the less used trail and says that if the doctor is going in that direction he would like to ride along.

As the two travel the road to Jordan's End, Father Peterkin, in response to the young doctor's questions, provides information about the ill fortune that has beset the master and mistress of the place. It appears that ever since the Civil War the fortunes of the Jordan family have been in severe decline. Now, according to Father Peterkin, young Alan Jordan has been taken ill and the management of the place is in the hands of his wife, Judith, the mother of their nine-year-old boy. Aside from a few black field hands, the only other personages at Jordan's End are three old women related to Alan by blood or marriage.

When the doctor arrives at the Jordan place, he is seized by a kind of foreboding, a feeling that is intensified by the appearance of the house itself—a crumbling Georgian manor house, with rotting eaves and windows without panes. Everywhere there is evidence of deterioration, of decline. His conversation with Father Peterkin provided him with information about the history of insanity among the male members of the Jordan family, but nevertheless he is unprepared for the sight of this relic.

Receiving no answer to his knock on the main door of the house, he proceeds toward the rear and encounters there Judith Jordan, the mistress of Jordan's End. He is very much taken by her haunting beauty. She welcomes him and acquaints him briefly with the recent illness affecting her husband. Alan Jordan is confined in an upstairs room of the house and is being watched over by two of the few remaining field hands. Implicit in her depiction of the trouble afflicting the master of the house is that he has lost his mind and must be watched constantly. The doctor accompanies her to the room, where Alan Jordan sits aimlessly in a chair, flanked by the two servants, playing listlessly with the fringe of a plaid shawl that has been draped around his shoulders. At a glance, the doctor sees that Jordan is "helplessly lost in the wilderness of the insane."

Informed that a famous alienist, Dr. Carstairs, is coming from Baltimore the next day to examine Jordan, the young doctor provides an opiate for use in sedating the patient should he become violent. He leaves Jordan's End, indicating to Judith Jordan that he will come again after Dr. Carstairs has made his visit.

On the following day, he encounters the doctor in the town as the celebrated alienist is about to board the train. In a brief conversation, he learns that Jordan's situation is hopeless; Jordan will not recover his faculties. Later that day, an old black man from Jordan's End comes to town and asks the doctor to return with him. When he arrives at Jordan's End, one of the old women greets him at the door and sends him upstairs, where he encounters the body of Alan Jordan, attended only by his wife and son, and being prepared for burial by two old women. Still young, handsome, and in his physical prime, the corpse of Alan Jordan moves the doctor emotionally. He realizes that Judith Jordan has administered the sedative in a dose sufficient to end the life of her husband and to end her own suffering.

The young woman who had come to Jordan's End as a bride only ten years ago and who had watched the result of generations of intermarriage destroy her beloved husband, as it had destroyed his father and his father's father and beyond, must now go on alone. The doctor, torn apart inside by the agony he knows the lovely, still young woman must feel, asks her if she wishes him to come back to Jordan's End again. She demurs, and he knows that she will never send for him. As the tale ends, the doctor drives off in his buggy through the gloomy woods.

Bibliography

Godbold, E. Stanly, Jr. Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.

Goodman, Susan. Ellen Glasgow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

McDowell, Frederick P. W. Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960.

Matthews, Pamela R. Ellen Glasgow and a Woman's Traditions. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

The Mississippi Quarterly 49 (Spring, 1996).

Rouse, Blair. Ellen Glasgow. New York: Twayne, 1962.

Scura, Dorothy M., ed. Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Taylor, Welford Dunaway, and George C. Longest, eds. Regarding Ellen Glasgow: Essays for Contemporary Readers. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2001.

Wagner, Linda W. Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.