The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow
"The Sheltered Life" by Ellen Glasgow is a novel that explores the complexities of family dynamics and societal expectations in the early 20th century American South. The story centers on nine-year-old Jenny Blair Archbald, who lives with her widowed mother and two aunts under the roof of her grandfather, General David Archbald, in a once-respectable but now declining neighborhood. Jenny's life is intertwined with that of her neighbors, Eva and George Birdsong, whose troubled marriage and societal struggles become a focal point of admiration and speculation among the women in Jenny's family.
As Jenny matures, she idolizes Eva's beauty and character, while also grappling with the realities of adult relationships, especially as she grows increasingly attracted to George, despite his infidelities. The narrative delves into themes of love, sacrifice, and the painful costs of living in a world of illusions, as Eva ultimately confides her regrets to Jenny. The story culminates in a tragic confrontation that forces the characters to face their sheltered lives and the realities they wish to avoid. Through its poignant character exploration and emotional depth, "The Sheltered Life" offers a critical reflection on the constraints and expectations placed on women within a patriarchal society.
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The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow
First published: 1932
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Psychological realism
Time of plot: 1906-1914
Locale: Richmond, Virginia
Principal characters
General David Archbald , an aged and aristocratic Southern patriarchJenny Blair Archbald , his free-spirited granddaughterAunt Etta , the general’s neurotic spinster daughterAunt Isabella , the general’s flirtatious daughterEva Howard Birdsong , an aristocratic, formerly celebrated beautyGeorge Birdsong , Eva’s charming, philandering husband
The Story:
“I’m alive, alive, alive, and I’m Jenny Blair Archbald,” exclaims the precocious nine-year-old Jenny, on having thrown aside as tedious Louisa Alcott’s Little Women (1868). Jenny lives with three somewhat downtrodden females—her widowed mother and two aunts—in the household of her grandfather, General David Archbald. An aged, highly civilized man, the general seeks to maintain his aristocratic family amid declining fortunes in a once-elegant but rapidly failing Queenborough neighborhood. Jenny, like her mother, grandfather, and aunts, is an ardent admirer of the similarly circumstanced married couple who live nearby, Eva and George Birdsong, whose marriage is a subject of speculative discussion among the Archbald women.
Eva Birdsong, a queenly belle of the 1890’s and still an acknowledged beauty as she approaches her forties, abandoned her social position as well as a planned singing career when she fell in love with George Birdsong. George, a barely successful attorney, is handsome, invariably charming and likable, and a consummate philanderer who recognizes Eva’s worth but is unable to rise to it. Aware that her beauty and the social attentions that it commands are waning, Eva refuses to acknowledge even the most blatant evidences of George’s adulteries.
Increasingly amoral and hedonistic, Jenny, even as a child, idolized Eva Birdsong for her regal beauty and character, neither of which, she realizes, lies within her reach. Jenny is also powerfully drawn to George, who has cultivated her affections since her childhood. Jenny, moreover, shares a secret with him: Having injured herself falling off roller skates one day in a poorer neighborhood, she was cared for, as it happened, by George and his black mistress. Over the years, Jenny is a frequent and favored visitor in the Birdsong household. Eva, as her fortunes worsen, begins to confide in Jenny, explaining how plans for her early career were jettisoned when, falling in love with George, she “stopped wanting anything else,” and that a “great love doesn’t leave room for anything else in a woman’s life.” At a grand party attended by all of the Archbalds and Birdsongs, George has an amorous encounter with a pretty young girl in a secluded garden. Eva, distraught, collapses, and even Jenny and other children present recognize her marital self-delusions.
Eight years later, old General Archbald muses over his life and the lives of his family and friends. Eva, whom the general reverences as the epitome of beautiful and courageous womanhood and thus as a symbol of his dying southern values, at the age of forty undergoes a maiming operation that is followed by a nervous collapse. Thereafter she is sickly and loses her striking beauty. Increasingly, she also recognizes the price exacted from her for a life of illusions. As General Archbald devotedly attends her, often in George’s company, he pities Eva for this. While cognizant of the cause of her malaise, however, he still thinks George has the right to philander and that men’s adulteries are irrelevant to their love relationships with their wives.
General Archbald also muses about his own youth and the destruction of his poetic talent by his father’s callous insistence that he adhere to a traditional southern male role. The general realizes that his conventional marriage resulted from a mistaken obedience to outworn standards. He fell into the right pattern, as he phrases it, but the center of the pattern is missing.
As Eva passively awaits a further operation, it becomes clear that she is weary of a life of “exacting pretense” and that she wants to die. The operation strips her of her remaining beauty, and she succumbs to a postoperative breakdown. Nevertheless, she clings to a faith in her love, excusing George’s philandering as a consequence of his kindness. Jenny, nearly eighteen, hopes to escape home and launch a career. She continues her idolatry of Eva, which Eva reciprocates by confiding her inner thoughts. Eva confesses to Jenny that for forty years she never really knew herself, and she warns Jenny that to surrender everything to love, as she did, is to become a slave to fear.
Despite Eva’s soul-baring confidences, Jenny is nevertheless attracted to George. When Eva departs to convalesce, their opportunities for meeting increase. One day after Eva’s return, Jenny and George, believing that she is upstairs, are locked in an embrace when Eva inadvertently discovers them. Terrified, Jenny flees into the ruins of Eva’s garden. Shortly afterward, Eva fatally shoots George amid the blood of his recent kills. Rallying to Eva, General Archbald outfaces the law by describing the murder as an accident, thus continuing to preserve his sheltered life and the sheltered lives of his kin from an encounter with reality.
Bibliography
Inge, Thomas M., ed. Ellen Glasgow. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976. Excellent centennial essays on “Miss Ellen’s” work, including pithy critical comments by Louis Rubin, Jr., on The Sheltered Life.
McDowell, Frederick P. W. Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960. Includes lucid analyses of The Sheltered Life in chapter 1, which provides fine background, and in chapter 11, which deals exclusively with this novel.
Patterson, Martha H. “Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and the Evolutionary Logic of Progressive Reform.” In Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, an image emerged of the “New Woman” who was well-educated, progressive, and white. Patterson’s book describes how Glasgow and other writers challenged this image, creating women characters who were African American, southern, and in other ways different from the popular conception of womanhood.
Raper, Julius Rowan. From the Sunken Garden. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Fine survey of Glasgow’s fiction between 1916 and 1945. Chapter 8 focuses on The Sheltered Life and places it in context with other Glasgow writings.
Scura, Dorothy M., ed. Ellen Glasgow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. An immensely helpful and enlightening collection of contemporary reviews of Glasgow’s writings, including an entire section devoted to The Sheltered Life.
Taylor, Welford Dunaway, and George C. Longest, eds. Regarding Ellen Glasgow: Essays for Contemporary Readers. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2001. This collection includes examinations of Glasgow and southern history, Glasgow and Calvinism, her depiction of southern women, and the feminist elements in her work. Includes chronology, bibliography, and index.
Thiebaux, Marcelle. Ellen Glasgow. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982. A lucid and informative survey of Glasgow’s novels. Includes an analysis of The Sheltered Life in chapter 7.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Glasgow’s Time in The Sheltered Life.” In Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives, edited by Dorothy M. Scura. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Focuses on Glasgow’s depiction of time in the novel.