A Long and Happy Life by Reynolds Price
"A Long and Happy Life" is the debut novel by Reynolds Price, focusing on the life of Rosacoke Mustian, a young woman navigating the complexities of love and societal expectations in a rural Southern community. The narrative centers on Rosacoke’s struggle with feelings of marginalization after being abandoned by Wesley Beavers, the man she desires, due to her reluctance to engage in a sexual relationship. In her desperation to secure a future with him, Rosacoke's attempts to bind Wesley to her ultimately lead to unintended consequences, including an unexpected pregnancy.
Faced with societal pressures and personal dilemmas, she grapples with the responsibilities of motherhood and the implications of her choices. Despite the grim realities of marriage and familial expectations, Rosacoke enters into a union with Wesley, motivated by love for her unborn child and the need to fulfill her role within the community. The novel interweaves themes of personal desire, community obligation, and redemption, with rich nature imagery that adds a mythic quality to the story. As Rosacoke's journey unfolds, it touches on the universal human need for connection and reassurance, suggesting that life, despite its challenges, moves forward with a sense of divine purpose.
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A Long and Happy Life by Reynolds Price
First published: 1962
The Work
A Long and Happy Life, Reynolds Price’s debut novel, chronicles the struggles of a young woman to assume her place in the community as a wife and mother. Reviewers welcomed this novel about a believable, vulnerable young woman as a relief from contemporary fiction and its academic experiments in self-consciousness.
Unwed and surrounded by fecundity, Rosacoke Mustian feels marginalized from her rural Southern community. Abandoned by the young man she desires—Wesley Beavers—because she will not have sex with him, Rosacoke becomes desperate. Rather than suffer social ostracization, she decides to try to arrest Wesley’s flight from the community and to bind him to her by giving him what he wants. In doing so, she mediates the tension between the demands of the community and the desires of the self. Her plan backfires as Wesley acknowledges her gift to him by calling her by another woman’s name during the act. To him, Rosacoke is simply another woman with whom he is sexual. Rather than gratifying her, her plan hurts her.
As a result of their one act of lovemaking, Rosacoke becomes pregnant. Repenting her selfishness in having set out to trap Wesley into a marriage that he did not want, she decides to assume sole responsibility for her predicament. Wesley accepts his duty, however, and proposes to her, a proposal that she accepts as a duty to her unborn child. He rescues her from the plight of being an unwed mother and thereby being ostracized from the community, as happened to her friend Mildred. Through the examples of her parents and her brother, she recognizes that married life may be a grim disappointment to her romantic expectations. Even so, the marriage is derived from her love for Wesley, and it allows her and him to assume their places in the community.
Rosacoke’s narrative reveals a design underlying her and Wesley’s personal stories that suggests that their coupling was destined. The nature imagery in the novel invests narrative with a mythic significance that emphasizes regeneration. Rosacoke and Wesley, for example, make love in a broomstraw field after following a buck and his two does to the spring. A Christmas pageant, in which Rosacoke plays the Virgin Mary, at the novel’s conclusion, implies that Rosacoke has been granted forgiveness. The novel satisfies what Price identifies as the audience’s need for consolation. The novel implies that people’s lives proceed in order, that God has not abandoned them.
Bibliography
Hoffman, Frederick J. The Art of Southern Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Hoffman was the first noteworthy critic to announce that Reynolds Price’s work was an important event in Southern fiction. Hoffman defends Price’s work against charges that the author is imitating William Faulkner.
Holman, David Marion. “Reynolds Price.” Fifty Southern Writers After 1900. Edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Holman provides the best overall discussion of A Long and Happy Life within the context of the novelist’s career and of Southern fiction. With a select bibliography and survey of major criticism.
Rooke, Constance. Reynolds Price. Boston: Twayne, 1983. One chapter of this text is given to Price’s first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Rooke does a thorough investigation and criticism of the novel. The novel’s connections to Price’s later works are delineated.
Shepherd, Allen. “Love (and Marriage) in A Long and Happy Life.” Twentieth Century Literature 17 (January, 1971): 20-35. Addresses the clichés of the situation (for example, of a “barefoot and pregnant” Southern belle) in order to point out its possible humor.
Vauthier, Simone. “The ‘Circle in the Forest’: Fictional Space in Reynolds Price’s A Long and Happy Life.” Mississippi Quarterly 28 (Spring, 1975): 123-146. Discussion of the connection between environment and psychological and emotional backgrounds.