Fidelity (1924) explores the fate of a young woman whose fidelity to herself makes her an outcast from the society in which she lives.
Ruth, the central character, falls in love with Stuart Wilson, a married man. Stuart is trapped within a loveless marriage and his wife Marion refuses to divorce him. Stuart learns that he has tuberculosis and decides to leave Freeport (the Iowa town in which the novel is set), for health reasons. Ruth goes with him to Colorado. In doing so she leaves her family, her childhood friend, Edith, and the close-knit community in which she lives. The only other person who knows about and supports Ruth in her decision to leave is Deane Franklin, another childhood friend who is himself in love with Ruth. Eleven years later, Ruth returns. Her mother has died and her father is dying. Most of the community remains closed to her; only her younger brother Ted, her classmate Annie and Deane Franklin welcome her return. Deane has recently married an outsider, Amy, who is being introduced into the social circles in which Ruth once moved. The arrival of Ruth leads to conflict between Deane and Amy because Amy is unable to understand Deane’s empathy for Ruth’s situation. After her visit home, Ruth returns to Stuart but when her younger brother Ted persuades Stuart’s wife finally to divorce him (finally giving Ruth the longed-for opportunity to marry Stuart) she decides not to and instead leaves him to make her own way alone.
Ruth’s fidelity to herself is at odds with the demands of the society in which she lives. Freeport offers a ‘pleasant, characterless’ sort of living ‘on a limited part of the surface of life’ and Ruth can see its attractions: even in the midst of her all-encompassing affair with Stuart, she is very conscious of the painfulness of ‘hurting her relations with people’, particularly her family. This awareness of the value of the ties that bind people together is even more acute when she returns to Freeport after eleven hard and lonely years living in Colorado with Stuart. She realises more fully the pain that she caused her family. As she walks through the town and looks at the homes there, she thinks of all the inhabitants and how their lives and feelings are so closely inter-woven:
‘…feelings which they as individuals knew reached out into common experiences… It was love… that gave these people that common life. Love was the fabric of it. Love made new combinations of people…The very thing that had shut her out was the thing drawing them into that oneness, that many in one. Homes were closed to her because of that very impulse out of which homes were built.’
She knows too the ‘kindly impulses’ that are there for anyone who plays by society’s rules. But she is also very aware that those ‘kindly impulses’ are ‘circumscribed’ by society. Various characters in the novel articulate just why someone like Ruth has to be treated so ruthlessly after she has done what she has done. She is regarded as a ‘traitor’, as having infringed rules which are necessary for the continuance of life as it is arranged within society; because she has defied the rules, she must be ‘shut out’. This is society’s way of protecting itself from a potentially disruptive force. Those within society must act for the greater good of the community, not on the basis of their individual desires as Ruth has done.
But Ruth feels herself drawn away from society by stronger currents than those that play on the surface of things. She feels these currents in her love for Stuart, which seems to her like an elemental force which she is powerless to hold back. She lives in a way that is open to the world, she feels vibrantly connected to it, caught up in the flow of life. This is a quality that is noted in her by Stuart and also by Deane Franklin – the ‘homely youngster’ with awkward movements, a wide generous mouth and ‘abrupt, hearty manner’ – who loves and supports Ruth throughout despite his unrequited feelings for her. Unlike so many of her Freeport contemporaries (Stuart’s wife, Marion with her poised and cool beauty and her ‘atmosphere of high self-valuation’, Mrs Lawrence, Edith’s mother with her ‘metallic pleasantness’ and the outsider, Deane’s wife Amy), Ruth is free from ‘those blurring artificialities that keep people apart’. She lives with empathy and reaches out to the world around her in a very human way. Deane, in particular, comes to feel that society tends to take away this humanity and replace it with a hard ‘crust’ of artificiality that is almost impossible to break through.
It is also Deane who most clearly articulates the opposition between ‘life’ and ‘Society’ that runs through the novel. On the one hand, there is life as it has been ‘arranged’ in society, all the things that bind people together in society together: trivial ties, stifling conventions and rules but also common experiences, love, and community and family life. Then there is ‘the whole flow of life’, and love and fidelity to oneself that, for Ruth seems entirely at odds with the society in which she lives. This is the main tension throughout the novel which Ruth grapples with and which propels her forward. And as she grows into her experiences, she experiences ‘a wonderful new feeling of there being as much for her in life as she herself had power to take’, as though the only limits on what she can do depend on her ability to collect and channel all the energies surging though life.
But she recognises within herself some of the instincts that help keep Society as closed and stifling as it is. On her return to Freeport, she encounters Mildred, a young woman who, like Ruth once did, is contemplating casting Society aside in favour of love for a married man. Ruth advises Mildred against following the course she has taken. She realises that her reaction is ‘just that thing which kept the world conservative. It was fear for others…’. There was something in ‘womankind [that] made them, no matter how daring for themselves, cautious for others. And perhaps that, all crusted round with things formal and lifeless, was the living thing at the heart of the world’s conservatism.’
Another female character in the novel, Annie, is freer than Ruth is from these instincts. Annie is an old classmate of Ruth, who Ruth once virtually ignored because she wasn’t part of the social set in which she and Edith, her closest childhood friend, moved. When Ruth returns to Freeport, Annie is one of the very few people who welcomes her and spending time with her awakens in Ruth a stronger sense of how to move on from the situation she is in. Despite the narrow circumstances of her life, ‘a marriage which offers no love or companionship, little in the way of material comforts or opportunities’, Annie shows no signs of being ground down by her life. She suggests that it is the very fact that she has had so little of what she would liked to have from life itself that has given her such a strong sense of self, a sense that what counts is what she thinks and feels. Annie is also a loving mother to her children but her views of motherhood have a very modern ring. She feels that ‘much precious life has gone dead under the idea of children being enough, letting them be all…Suppose they, in their turn, have that idea; then life’s never really lived, is it? Always just passed on, always put off.’
After her time with Annie, Ruth begins to face the fact that her love for Stuart, once such a bright, burning part of life, has been worn down by their life in Colorado, their ‘cramping little house full of petty questions’ and their ‘hard little routine’. She reflects that things might have been different ‘had the usual channels of living been opened to them..’. Indeed, she comes to feel that love has to be ‘related to living’ in order to remain ‘the heart of life…’. A love like theirs is not sustainable unless they can live out their lives as a couple whilst remaining part of society, part of a wider community. Yet despite this realisation, Ruth does not see their love as having ‘failed’. ‘Far from engulfing all the rest of life, it seemed now that love should open life to one. …it failed if it did not leave her bigger than it had found her… it should send one on.’
15 replies on “Persephone Book No 4: Fidelity by Susan Glaspell”
The huge central theme of the individual pitted against society shines like a lurex thread right through the fabric of the whole. We see not only the constant shimmer in the references to the effect of the struggle on Deane and Ruth, but also intermittant glints in the occasional admission of sympathy from characters like Edith and Cora. The importance of Edith’s wedding and the significance of Ruth’s behaviour recalled for me the scenes of Bette Davis in (I think) ‘The Old Maid’ in which, as a bridesmaid, she escapes her friend’s society wedding for an assignation and ends up pregnant. Similarly, I had in mind BD fighting for the right to nurse Henry Fonda in ‘Jezebel’. She was good at choosing roles which showed a woman against society, wasn’t she?
A related theme is the need to think. Annie tells Ruth that ‘we are kept alive by thinking’ and Deane tells her ‘you made me think about things.’ In this idea, and in her treatment of it, Glaspel is quite Jamesian: she is not afraid to spend pages on her characters’ thoughts and their consequences, as opposed to actions and interactions.
As for the Kate Chopin connection, I think Ruth is a progression. Emma Bovary came first and was written by a man:revolutionary as she is, she has to finish herself off in a world which has no place for her. Edna Pontellier came next and was written by a woman – she walks off into the sea but we are left wondering if she submitted to the waves or walked back out of them again. Ruth Holland, written later, as a time when society was in flux, and by a woman, sticks out for being true to herself (as does Deane Franklin), decides against marriage and chooses to try to be successful on her own terms.
Loved it – when I started out, I didn’t really think about the title, but hacing come to the end, I can see that it’s not just marital fidelity we’re reading about here: Polonius’ advice to Laertes is echoing strong, too . . . .
I completely agree, Fidelity is such a brave novel about women’s thoughts and passions and in a wonderful tradition of literature on the subject. I also think it’s brilliant at comparing different kinds of female friendship: Ruth’s teenage one with Edith and then later with Annie. So very familiar!
Do enlighten me about Polonius on fidelity.
I enjoyed reading this book however I found it a little harder to get into than the previous book. I imagine it must have caused a stir when it was published as it deals with more modern views on marriage, relationships and even of the self (we now seem to live in a “me” or “i ” age – beginnings of this seem reflected in the last chapter in a very small respect.)
I thought the title indicated fidelity in marriage and more fidelity in the self. Staying true to what and who you really are and never straying from this. It would be easy to dismiss the other female characters as shallow and petty but society was so very different back then and life was hard for those who didn’t adhere to the “rules”. I agree that they were protecting their lives by their rules but of course it doesn’t make them right.
I suppose this is a story lived out every day by everyone. Making decisions when you were younger or less cynical or even less exhausted by life that have a great impact on the rest of your life. Maturity and hindsight are great things! At least these days we have more opportunities as women to persue our own interests and be able to support ourselves but we must still live with the impact that our decisions make on the lives of our family and ourselves.
I probably wouldn’t have read this book usually but that is why I’m really enjoying this forum. It’s a great opportunity for me to read each Persephone book and communicate with other Persephone lovers! A giant monthly book club really!
I’m enjoying the forum too, and I’m thrilled that Fidelity is this month’s book because it’s definitely one of my favourite Persephone books. I can remember reading Edith Wharton and Willa Cather novels and thinking that there must be others written that were ‘in between’ and then I read Fidelity! By the way, Elaine Showalter’s book about American women writers ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ is an incredible resource for people interested in all the female writers excluded from the American canon: it’s where I discovered Tess Slesinger and Katherine Anne Porter, both of whom wrote brilliant short stories.
Back to Fidelity! I think the opening paragraph is a perfect example of Glaspell’s seriously impressive quality of writing. The opening sentence hits you and immediately we want to know more: ‘It was hard to get back from the easy current of everyday talk’. Why? Who is talking and who has interrupted them? What did they say? We know instantly that we are amongst characters who enjoy polite, perhaps superficial conversation and we know that something has occurred to shake them up. Our knowledge is affirmed as we read on: ‘Cora Albright’s question had too rudely pulled them out of it, disturbing the quiet flow of inconsequential things.’ This is prime Edith Wharton territory, stuffy people talking about stuffy things, and then Cora Albright (who is she?) says something so shocking that they are all thrown off. And the reader is desperate to know what she said!
The paragraph finishes with them setting back in to their tedious talk and we still don’t know what has upset them – it takes another two paragraphs before we find out. I love the tension that she has created without using any dialogue, just careful observation of an awkward social moment and in a few lines has set up everything that follows in the novel. It’s so very clever and something that only the best writers can do. Why isn’t she read more?!
Apparently some of her plays are still shown at small theatres but I’ve never been able to see any of them. I get the feeling that they should be better than Eugene O’Neill plays which seem to be having a revival at the moment.
I haven’t read Brook Evans yet but it’s on my pile to read soon!
I finished Fidelity last night and had to take some time to collect my thoughts about it. I found it an incredibly moving novel that has taken a firm place among the Persephone books I like best. I agree with Florence that Susan Glaspell is a brilliantly gifted writer, and I was drawn into the story from the very first sentence. I found the novel entirely relevant to today’s world. Ruth’s struggle to keep true to her ‘self’ and questioning what is most important in life still resonates today. I especially admired how true to life Ruth’s story is. There is no easy ending to the story; the reader doesn’t know if Ruth in the end lives happily or what befalls her in New York. We are only assured that Ruth has the strength of character to meet whatever comes her way and the gift to rejoice in simply living.
JaneF, Polonious gave his son, Laertes, advice about many things on his departure from Elsinore, among other things, ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’. He finished by saying words to the effect of ‘this above all things, to thine own self be true’. Check out your ‘Hamlet’, you’ll find it all there.
There is an advertisement for Fidelity at the back of a 1925 novel by Richmal Crompton called Anne Morrison. Here are some of the quotes. They make it even more startling that Fidelity was forgotten, and still remains largely unknown, in America – where it is after all set.
The Evening Standard called it ‘a notable achievement. One of the finest bits of fiction America has yet given to the English speaking world.’ In the Daily Graphic the (then) very well-known critic SPB Mais said it was ‘a book of quite astonishing beauty’. James Agate (ditto) in the Sunday Times called Susan Glaspell ‘a genius’. The Irish Times said that Fidelity was ‘without doubt one of the finest novels produced in any country in recent years.’ The Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘Here we are face to face with a writer of singular strength.’ The Edinburgh Evening News called Fidelity ‘a brilliantly written book.’ While The Referee called it ‘curiously entrancing. There is no getting away from the subtlety of Susan Glaspell’s characters or from the resistless movement of her story. Ruth Holland is at once a very beautiful and an extraordinarily complex character. A book in a hundred.’ Finally, John O’ London’s Weekly called Fidelity ‘ a literary achievement. The genius of Susan Glaspell has turned thoughts into crystals and sometimes into crystalised tears.’
First, a thank-you to Persephone Books for publishing this and similar books. Why it requires a London publisher to “re-discover” American literature is a mystery to me.
I’m always interested in book titles when they indicate an author’s intent. I found three references in Fidelity. My speculation is that the notion “Fidelity” evolves in the novel from (1) unexamined reliance on a socially-constructed abstract of love/passion, to (b) a concrete behavioral commitment, such that once you’ve committed to a course of action, you must remain “true, to (c) an inner consistency, such that you maintain ‘fidelity” to your evolving self. In the end, all three have relevance to Susan Glaspell’s view of “society.”
The first reference is found halfway through the novel in Chapter 20 (p. 197): “The very fact that she did see so well, and so sorrowingly, what she had done [by the hurt she caused to her family and others], brought this new feeling that it should not have been that way, that what she felt [for Stuart], and her fidelity to that feeing — ruthless fidelity though it was — should not have blighted like this.” . . . Ruth vs. ruthless? I think Susan Glaspell was trying to say that Ruth elevated her passion to an abstract that engendered her complete and unselfish commitment to the ideal of love, an ideal that had been instilled by others. Her feeling was not exactly classical romantic love, but certainly Love!. And how dare Love! create hardship!
The second reference is found in Chapter 27 (p. 264), in Ruth’s rather awkwardly framed thought, as she recognizes how Deane’s friendship for her has created a threat to his new marriage: “Surely a woman would be proud of a man who had so loyally, at such great cost, been a woman’s friend, who, because of friendship, because of fidelity to his own feeling, would stand out that way against others.” In other words, why can’t Deane’s new wife Amy understand that his “fidelity of friendship” to Ruth was just an augur of his marital fidelity to Amy?
The third reference is found in Chapter 33 (p. 347), as Ruth is certain that fidelity to her life meant leaving Stuart: “But it was her fidelity to those days gone that made her draw just a little away, and, tears running down her face, shake her head.”
I quite enjoyed the book, and wish I had my own “Annie” to spend a week with every decade or so.
I found Fidelity moving, infuriating & enjoyable by turns. Freeport society is pictured so brilliantly, with all its restrictions – mainly on women’s lives of course.
Initially I kept thinking ‘thank goodness that society has changed a good deal since then’ but by the end it struck me that in some ways (in the USA) it hasn’t changed much at all. The current political movements (eg the ‘tea-party’) are just as parochial, inward-looking, undemocratic and restrictive on freedom of choice as the small-town life described so vividly in ‘Fidelity’. What saddens me is to find women in the forefront of these movements. T
he character of Ruth is well-drawn, with whom it’s easy to empathise, & although I could understand why she finally left Stuart, I found it harder to follow her abstract feelings at the end. But Ruth is nothing if not brave, a woman before her time perhaps.
Jill Bennett
Ooops, sorry about the typo above. I’m still bristling with the way Ruth’s so-called friends turned their backs on her, and the way society treated her only true friends, mainly Deane. Am now going to read ‘Brook Evans’.
What an excellent read this was. I tried hard to visualize the ladies of Freeport and Ruth. There’s perhaps surprisingly little detail of their clothes. We’re told how young and slim Amy looks to Deane in her white dress and how Edith’s trousseau was a mountain of white garments, but very little else. The descriptions of the town and countryside are far more detailed though and very interesting. Was anyone else a little surprised by the honesty of the description of the drudgery and dinginess of Ruth’s life in Colorado? It certainly didn’t make homesteading sound very appealing. You could feel the cold along with her. And Stuart is moving on to (presumably) even colder Montana winters! I found the middle of the book (where Ruth learns of how her mother reacted to her departure) terribly poignant, but felt that the ending is upbeat and optimistic in tone – though the thought of Deane leaving to be a doctor on the battlefields of WW1 fills one with dread nowadays. I too want to read more by Susan Glaspell now.
Interesting contributions to the discussion so far. I think Ruth stands out as a very genuine character and presumably she rings so true because Susan Glaspell herself knew well the feeling of being at odds with the currents of the society in which she lived.
I like the fact that she seems fascinated with exploring ideas that are important to her through both the speech and the thoughts of her characters. And the pace of the novel seems to come from her desire to express these ideas. Ruth’s story is almost an appeal: an appeal for greater understanding for an individual like her from Society at large. There is a quality of urgency and breathlessness about parts of it – as though the author were bursting to get these ideas out. I think this gives the novel greater immediacy: one senses how impassioned its writer is about what she writes about. But it also has what could be called a philosophical quality: at times, the characters, particularly Ruth, reflect upon their own circumstances as though pondering larger, eternal questions rather than just being caught up in their own unfolding stories. This can seem a little abstract but the reflections never stray too far from the characters and the narrative.The characters – particularly Ruth – remain very vivid and real. The revelation of characters’ reflections is perhaps best executed with Ruth and Dean, and slightly less well done with Marion, Stuart’s wife but – as contributors above have emphasised – one of the central ideas in the novel is the importance of thinking and so it makes perfect sense for Susan Glaspell to want to write by unfolding the thoughts of her characters in this way.
I agree with the previous contributor that in some sense the novel is not very visual. However, what it did make me think of was Tonalism – an artistic style that was in vogue in America at the time i.e. from the 1880s to about 1915, before it was eclipsed by Impressionism – which tended to involve landscapes with an overall blurring or misting of colour tones, dominated by dark, neutral hues. (Well known painters who used this style include Whistler.) Some of the descriptions of the natural landscapes Ruth walks through – and her feelings as she walks which seem so much part of the landscape – are particularly reminiscent of this sort of tonal quality.
What a cleverly told story, with the author’s views on types and shade of fidelity put across clearly and thoughtfully. I was in agreement all the way through. Society’s restrictions, such as Ruth and Stuart still being snubbed by people in Colarado, all these years later, when they find out their history, seem petty and frustrating. I felt Ruth’s anguish and appreciated her dilemmas. I was right behind her, going through her trials and tribulations and cheered her final decision.
BUT hang on, Ruth ran off with a married man on the day of her best friend’s wedding! They had been having an affair for four years right under the noses of friends and family! I know Stuart is ill but couldn’t they have waited a few more days rather than have their actions become part of the history of the wedding? Poor Edith! What betrayal, what mistrust, those around Ruth must have felt. They’d been taken for fools. They would be in turmoil, reliving every event, looking for missed clues. How selfish Ruth and Stuart had been! No wonder their friends and neighbours closed ranks (and just as in Someone at a Distance last month, the children put pressure on the parents to act drastically, regardless of their own feelings.)
Susan Glaspell’s construction of the story cleverly kept me totally on Ruth’s side and it wasn’t until I got to the end of the book and reflected, that the horrors of Ruth’s actions dawned on me. Ruth broke her mother’s heart, jeopardised her brother’s marriage, blighted her friend’s wedding, nearly ruined Deane’s career, yet despite it all, I liked and admired her very much and I hoped her new life in New York brought her happiness.
It seemed to me, with the definition of fidelity in mind, that Ruth and Stuart were faithful to themselves rather than each other, marriage, or society. After all, as Many A Mickle brought out, if they’d thought of anybody else, things might (would?) have been different.
I didn’t care for the book. Not wanting to feel totally negative about the author, I found another of her novels, Brook Evans. I found myself speed-reading through it, not really caring about the story. Still not wanting to give up, I located A Jury of Her Peers, American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter.
Lo and behold! That held a key for me to understand, if not enjoy, Glaspell. I found myself agreeing with almost everything Showalter wrote about Glaspell, and figured out right away why Glaspell’s writing seems so negative, at least for me just now.
Please keep in mind I read library (i.e., much earlier) editions of Glaspell’s books; therefore, I hadn’t the benefit of Persephone’s preface, which Showalter quotes as one of her bibliographical notes on Glaspell!
As I don’t know what’s already in the Persephone preface, and perhaps everyone of you have also read Showalter, I won’t quote passages from her book. However, if this leaves a gap, just let me know and I’ll gladly provide.
Perhaps none of you have lived in the American Midwest, where I am just now, so I’ll just say that in my opinion Showalter was spot on with her own quotes from and about Midwesterners’ ideas of their cosmopolitan-ness, and that hasn’t changed since Glaspell’s time. (tongue-in-cheek and a smiley wink)
Happy Autumn to All!
D Ellis
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