Radical Romance in the Piedmont: Olive Tilford Dargan's Gastonia Novels
In 1929, the National Textile Workers Union led a violent strike in Gastonia, North Carolina that caught the attention of the national and international media. At that time, the Piedmont region was particularly resistant to union organizing and the Communist-led NTWU pushed boundaries even further by attempting to unionize across racial divides. Increased violence on the picket line led to the murders of Police Chief Orville F. Anderholt and a popular strike leader named Ella May Wiggins. When NTWU leaders Fred Beal and Vera Buch were accused of Anderholt's murder, the liberal media quickly connected this southern trial to that of anarchists Sacco and Venzetti, two Italian immigrants whose trial and execution solidified their place as labor heroes. The Labor Defender and New Masses featured Wiggins's plight as a single mother, raising her children on her meager salary; her death at the hands of management thugs quickly captured the imagination of the American public. Because women like Ella May Wiggins and Vera Buch became instant heroines, the Gastonia labor struggle became a symbol of the strength, courage, and tenacity of women workers in America. These dramatic events in Gastonia inspired at least six novels, four written by women and two by men. (1) In this article, I will focus on two novels by Olive Tilford Dargan in order to investigate the ways in which Dargan addresses both the political and personal dramas of these uncompromising southern women in the development of her heroine, Ishma Waycaster. (2) The narrative in Dargan's first novel, Call Home the Heart 0932), climaxes during the events of the Gastonia strike, but Dargan continues to focus on labor rebellion in the sequel, A Stone Came Rolling (1935), a novel that affirms Ishma Waycaster's role as leader of her working-class community. While Call Home the Heart has received some critical attention thus far, most critics focus on Ishma's failure to triumph over her latent racism. For example, in her recent assessment of Dargan's literary contributions to proletarian literature, Anna Shannon Elfenbein points to Ishma's regression to base instincts at the end of Call Home the Heart as representative of her failure as a radical heroine. However, I believe that Dargan made important revisions to the standard proletarian conversion narrative in her construction of Ishma Waycaster, revisions which become clearer when her Gastonia novels are read as one continuous narrative. Moreover, I will focus primarily on the events in Ishma's life as they evolve into what I will call "radical romance," a narrative strategy in direct contrast to those employed by male authors in the 1930s. A careful analysis of the literary texts written in response to the Gastonia strike reveals a gendered difference around the issue of sexuality: male authors view the sexual undercurrent of a workers' strike as a threat to masculine agency in the contest between management and workers, while female authors view expressions of female sexuality as a site of potential resistance and political strength. In making this argument, I do not ignore the decidedly masculine tone set by critics like Mike Gold, whose 1928 call to "Go Left" was directed at the "wild (male) youth, at work in the coalmines" (Folsom 188). As the newly minted editor of New Masses, Gold was in the position to set the ideological and theoretical pace for left-leaning writers of the 1930s. His views reflect what feminist critics have since noted about leftist ideologues: though they gave lip service to issues involving gender, they often downplayed or ignored the "woman question." According to Alice KesslerHarris and Paul Lauter, "though leftist ideology in the 1930S recognized the 'special oppression' of women and formally espoused sexual equality, in practice, the Left tended to subordinate problems of gender to the overwhelming tasks of organizing the working class and fighting fascism" ("Introduction" ix). …
Doubled Plots: Romance and History
Doubled Plots: Romance and History edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, with essays by Susan L. Blake, Stephanie Burley, Mary Paniccia Carden, Rita B. Dandridge, Janet Dean, Charles H. Hinnant, Rita Keresztesi, Huining Ouyang, Susan Strehle, and Karin E. Westman. An examination of how two diverse genres parallel and reflect each other. In art, myth, and popular culture, romance is connected with the realm of emotions, private thought, and sentimentality. History, its counterpart, is the seemingly objective compendium of public fact. In theory, the two genres are diametrically opposed, offering widely divergent views of human experience. In this collection of essays, however, the writers challenge these basic assumptions and consider the two as parallel and as reflections of each other. Looking closely at specific narratives, they argue that romance and history share expectations and purposes and create the metaphors that can either hold cultures and institutions together or drive them apart. The writers explore the internal contradictions of both genres, as seen in works in which the elements of both romance and history are present. The theme that flows throughout this collection is that romance literature and art frequently engage with or comment on actual historical events or histories. Included among the contributions are discussions of romance and race in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the Rudolph Valentino film classic The Sheik, the series of English "Regency Romance" novels, the constructs of love and history in two of Alice McDermott's novels, and a feminist reading of African American women's historical romances. Moreover, the essays approach romance and history from a variety of critical and political perspectives and examine a wide selection of romances from the 1800s to contemporary times. They look at bestsellers and literary classics, at texts by and for white audiences, and at works created by writers on the margins of Western culture. The anthology is a radical approach to romance, a genre often dismissed as diversionary and reactionary. It explores how well this genre serves for critical examinations of history. Susan Strehle is a professor of English at Binghamton University. Mary Paniccia Carden is an assistant professor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.
The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954
This study examines the relationship between society and literature and shows how the proletarian novel, a literary phenomenon of the 1930s, was a reflection of current interest in revolutionary Marxism. Also discussed are the reasons why literary critics of the following decades dismissed these writings as bizarre and improbable and questioned how the writers could have so badly miscalculated the future. Examples are drawn from socialist works such as Issac Kahn Freedman's "By Bread Alone" and Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron Mills", Edward Dahlberg's "Bottom Dogs", Mary Heaton's "Strike!", and Richard Wright's "Native Son". The book discusses why so little radical fiction was written between 1939 and 1954. A chronological bibliography of American radical novels from 1901 to 1954 is also included.