After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow

A continuation of Josephine Donovan's exploration of American women's literary traditions, begun with New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition , which treats the nineteenth-century realists, this work analyzes the writing of major women writers of the early twentieth century—Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow. The author sees the Demeter-Persephone myth as central to these writers' thematics, but interprets the myth in terms of the historical transitions taking place in turn-of-the-century America. Donovan focuses on the changing relationship between mothers and daughters—in particular upon the "new women's" rebellion against the traditional women's culture of their nineteenth-century mothers (both literary and literal). An introductory chapter traces the male-supremacist ideologies that formed the intellectual climate in which these women wrote. Reorienting Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow within women's literary traditions produces [...]major reinterpretations of their works, including such masterpieces as Ethan Frome , Summer , My Antonia , Barren Ground , and others.