“A Sure Terrain”: Spencer’s Mississippi Novels

Abstract

The 2001 publication of The Southern Woman, the Modern Library’s collection of Elizabeth Spencer’s short fiction, has served to clarify Spencer’s legacy, drawing the reader’s attention to Spencer’s complex and independent female protagonists. Indeed, Spencer’s literary reputation has been defined in large part by characters who display the same powerful will evinced in Frances Harvey in “First Dark”: we might think of Teresa Stubblefield, whose timidity hides a potent resolve that allows her to dismiss her obligations as a dutiful southern daughter in order to explore her own desires in “The White Azalea,” or Deborah Dale, the socially rebellious and sexually progressive protagonist of the widely celebrated story “The Girl Who Loved Horses,” who embraces marriage, and ultimately motherhood, but does so entirely on her own terms. In attempting to identify an overarching theme in Spencer’s stories, critic David Harvird rightly observes that Spencer’s heroines are almost universally defined by their “pursuit of an elusive élan vital” that inevitably “puts them at odds with a vast, extended southern family” (371).