The Sheltered Life Book

Shelter is nowhere to be found in The Sheltered Life, Ellen Glasgow's grimly realistic novel of a slow-motion tragedy that enfolds the lives of two once-genteel families in a fictionalized 20th-century Richmond. With surgical precision, the great Virginia novelist anatomizes the way in which a society that is fixated upon externals like manners and decorum can tolerate and even foster an inward corruption that destroys the spirit.

Glasgow is often regarded as either a forerunner or an early example of the Southern Literary Renaissance - the emergence, in the early to mid-20th century, of a profusion of great writers from the American South who combined fine observation of regional detail with trenchant social criticism, psychologically astute characterizations, and universal, even mythic, themes.

Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Glasgow early learned to question many of the unspoken values of life in her home city - the oppressive racial norms, the subjugation of women (Glasgow's right to vote was not recognized until she was 47 years old), the sentimentalizing of the Confederacy that had had its capital at Richmond, and the cult of manners that so often left so many difficult truths unspoken.

The Sheltered Life is perhaps Glasgow's most direct attack upon that Southern cult of manners. Set in the early 20th century - beginning in 1906, and continuing to the onset of the First World War in 1914 - this novel takes as its subject the changing fortunes of two families, the Archbalds and the Birdsongs, who live in a rapidly industrializing area on a once-select street of Queenborough, Virginia (Glasgow's fictionalized Richmond).

The chemical factory at the end of the street often sends up an unpleasant smell: but as the novel's narrator explains, "The Birdsongs stayed because, as they confessed proudly, they were too poor to move"; their neighbors, the Archbalds, stay because the aging family patriarch, General Archbald, "in his seventy-sixth year but still incapable of retreat, declared that he would never forsake Mrs. Birdsong. Industrialism might conquer, but they would never surrender" (p. 5). With just such fineness of detail, resonantly symbolic of a post-Civil War South that is still resistant to change, Glasgow begins what might be termed a tragedy of manners.

Just as William Blake titled one of his poetic collections Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789), so Glasgow seems to have liked setting up a counterpoint between the perspectives of a younger, more innocent character and an older, more experienced one. In the case of The Sheltered Life, the perspective of youth is provided by Jenny Blair Archbald, who goes from age 9 to 17 over the course of the novel; the perspective of age is conveyed through her grandfather, General Archbald, an aging Civil War veteran who is forever viewing the early-20th-century New South scene in terms of the dramatic changes that he has witnessed over the course of his life.

With his retirement from a successful postwar legal practice, General Archbald has ample time in which to observe the Archbald's neighbors, the Birdsongs - like the Archbalds, former members of their community's upper class who have fallen on hard times. Wife Eva, "in her prime, before misfortune had sapped her ardent vitality, would have put to shame all the professional beauties of Paris or London" (p. 100); she was the reigning belle of Queenborough. Unfortunately, Eva did not follow the unspoken rule for belles of her community and secure a good marriage to the wealthiest of her suitors; rather, she married the handsomest of her suitors, George Birdsong.

And George is a man with what Richmonders of Glasgow's time might have delicately referred to as "personal issues." While his legal practice has never really taken off, and he's never really even worked terribly hard at the law, he's a likable fellow: General Archbald describes George as a man of "full-bodied virtue" and "humanity", a man who is easy to like. Yet therein lies the trouble: George Birdsong, "with his thick wind-blown hair, his smiling eyes, his look of virile hardness, of inexhaustible energy" (p. 101), is still the handsomest and most charming man in Queenborough; women are drawn to him, and he is not inclined to discourage their attentions.

Eva knows this truth about George; yet in Queenborough's manners-oriented culture, where talking about what is really going on is considered terribly impolite, she is able (usually) to pretend that she doesn't know. And the reader develops, early in the novel, a strong sense of foreboding, a feeling that this situation cannot end well.

The reader is introduced, with 9-year-old Jenny Blair, to George's philandering ways in a chapter when Jenny Blair gets rebellious and goes roller skating down at the lower end of Canal Street, in a neighborhood that is fast becoming disreputable. Injured in a fall at that end of the street, Jenny Blair is taken into the home of Memoria, an African American woman who takes in washing for the Birdsongs. George is there, too, and is quick to secure from Jenny Blair a just-between-us promise that she won't tell anyone about seeing George at Memoria's home:

"I feel…that you can be trusted," Mr. Birdsong continued earnestly, pronouncing each syllable very slowly and distinctly, as if he were trying to impress its importance upon her mind. "I feel that we would never, never give each other away."

"Oh, never, never!"

"Nothing could make us tell, for instance, about this afternoon."

"Nothing. Not - not wild horses."

"Even after you're grown up, we'll still have our secret."

"Always. Nobody shall ever know. Even if I live to be a - a thousand, I'll never tell anybody."

"Well, that's what I call loyal," he answered, and the strain seemed to relax in his voice. "You're a friend worth having, and no man has too many of them at my age." (p. 49)

Eva Birdsong eventually undergoes a physical health crisis that counterpoints the emotional crises that she has regularly undergone when evidence of George's philandering has proven impossible to ignore; and a section of the book titled "The Illusion" brings those elements of the novel to the fore. Ill with some sort of trouble that goes unspoken by the characters - the implication seems to be that she is going to need a hysterectomy - Eva replies to a nurse's assurances that everything is going to be alright by saying, "I hear, but there are times when I am worn out with hoping. I've hoped too much in my life" (pp. 150-51).

General Archbald meanwhile has a conversation with a young and reform-minded physician, Dr. John Welch, that shows the differing perspectives of different generations in this New South community. Welch is angry at the mental anguish that he sees Eva Birdsong suffering: "All the conditions of her life are unnatural. I honestly believe…that she has never drawn a natural breath since she was married. If she dies…it will be the long pretense of her life that has killed her." General Archbald, who comes from that Victorian generation that fought the Civil War, replies, "I understand that better than you can. We were brought up that way. It was part of the code" (p. 153).

In the latter part of the novel, with its 1914 setting, and the First World War breaking out in Europe, long-simmering conflicts are also breaking out in Queenborough, Virginia. Jenny Blair is 17 years old now, and her feelings toward the ever-charming George Birdsong have blossomed into a genuine crush that had its beginnings in the secret that they shared at Memoria's house. John Welch, the perceptive young doctor, senses what may be going on in Jenny Blair's mind, and says to her, "I know you better than you think! You are like every other young girl who has grown up without coming in touch with the world. You are so bottled up inside that your imagination has turned into a hothouse for sensation" (p. 250).

John Welch even tries to warn Jenny Blair about her feelings for George Birdsong:

They had stopped before her gate, and he was looking down on her with a troubled expression. "You will be careful, won't you, Jenny Blair?"

"Careful?"

"I mean about everything, now that Cousin Eva is ill." Then he frowned. "It may be just my imagination, but - oh, well, you know why I am speaking."

"No, I don't, and I don't want to! I don't care what you say about anybody." (p. 251)

John's good advice goes unheeded; and between, on the one hand, Jenny Blair's first full-fledged teenage crush, and, on the other hand, George Birdsong's tendency to be drawn toward any young woman who is drawn toward him, the stage is set for a tragic resolution - one that Glasgow uses to show how strong is the tendency, among the Richmonders and Virginians of her time, to close ranks around people of one's own social status, no matter the ethical facts of a case.

In an afterword to this University Press of Virginia edition of The Sheltered Life, Carol Manning, of Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, writes perceptively that Glasgow in this novel "portrays the remnants of the Old South as a society that has become stagnant and ingrown - a society that blindly holds to past ideals and past rules of conduct while the future knocks at the door" (p. 300). Professor Manning's insight provides a suitable way to conclude this look at The Sheltered Life - a singularly powerful look at the tragic consequences that can befall a society where the need to be "proper" becomes an all-encompassing social imperative.