Plains Song, for Female Voices by Wright Morris

First published: 1980

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: The early 1900’s to the late 1970’s

Locale: Madison County, Nebraska, and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Cora Atkins, a Nebraska farmwife
• Emerson Atkins, her husband
• Orion Atkins, his brother
• Belle Rooney Atkins, Orion’s wife
• Madge Atkins Kibbee, the daughter of Cora and Emerson
• Sharon Rose Atkins, daughter of Belle and Orion, a music teacher in Chicago and at Wellesley College

The Novel

Plains Song, for Female Voices contrasts the lives of two women of the Nebraska plains who seemingly have completely different ways of looking at the world. Cora Atkins comes west from Ohio in the early twentieth century to be a farmwife for Emerson Atkins and learns to accept the limitations of such an existence. Sharon Rose Atkins, Cora’s niece, is appalled by the plains life and heads east to discover herself. The lives of four generations of Atkins women are interwoven in this plotless treatment of changes in a way of life.

Sharon’s mother, Belle, is an Ozark hillbilly whose verbosity conflicts with the stoic silence of Cora, Emerson, and Orion, her husband and Emerson’s brother. Belle’s emotional isolation on the Atkins farm ends when she dies giving birth to her second daughter, Fayrene. Cora has only one child, Madge, the result of the first and last sexual act between her and Emerson.

The outgoing Sharon and the passive Madge develop a close relationship, but when Madge marries Ned Kibbee, Sharon feels betrayed by the cousin whose sole function has been to witness her accomplishments: “She was like a calf, bred and fattened for the market, and the buyer had spoken for her.” A music scholarship in Chicago allows Sharon to escape such a fate.

Sharon later tries to save Blanche, Madge’s oldest daughter, from the slavish life she associates with the plains and Cora, but Blanche turns out to be even more sluggishly passive than her mother. Meanwhile, after Emerson dies, Cora descends into madness, finally paying for years of labor and emotional abstinence; Madge becomes an invalid after a stroke and is cared for by Blanche.

When Cora dies, Sharon, now a teacher at Wellesley College, returns to Nebraska for the first time in thirty-three years to discover that she is considered a heroine by some Atkins women. Madge’s daughter Caroline tells her, “we don’t get married anymore unless we want to. We all had your example.” Sharon sees that Cora’s farm is nothing but a field of tree stumps and is frightened by the bleak emptiness, feeling more than ever her obligation to answer the questions Cora was never able—or willing—to ask.

The Characters

Cora and Sharon are the most fully developed female characters in Morris’s fiction. On the surface, they are complete opposites, but they share some qualities. Perhaps recognition of these is part of what frightens Sharon.

The six-foot, humorless Cora accepts all the duties of a farmwife but one, biting through her hand on her wedding night, her scar becoming representative of the emotional distance between her and her bewildered husband and of her particular individuality and independence. As with the most complex Morris characters, Cora’s strengths and weaknesses merge to become almost indistinguishable.

Cora is not very affectionate toward her daughter and the nieces she must rear after Belle’s death. Unable to cope with emotional complications, Cora imposes order on her life by reducing it to a simple level that she can control: “Cora had little desire to see more than she had already seen, or feel more than she had already felt.” She convinces herself that her life makes sense, that it is what God intends her to have: “Chickens, people, and eggs had their appointed places, chores their appointed time, changes their appointed seasons, the night its appointed sleep.” All this, however, does not stop her from experiencing a strange sense of guilt for having peace of mind.

In Chicago for the 1933 World’s Fair, she cannot bring herself to visit Sharon as there is no possibility of exerting control over her niece on her own ground. Cora’s effort to live her life, limited though it may be, on her own terms ultimately gives her a considerable degree of dignity.

Sharon is admirable for the same reasons, though her life is hardly limited. She learns to overcome what Cora merely accepts. Sharon makes something of herself by breaking with her roots but has mixed emotions about the “half-conscious people so friendly and decent it shamed her to dislike them.” She wants to understand why the people of the plains, especially the women, are as they are, how they can settle for so little, how they, like Madge, can find happiness in such a life.

The answer lies in the compromises made by all people, including Sharon. She forsakes some of the emotional attachments, such as relations with the opposite sex, that humans are supposed to need, but unlike her relatives, she is aware of what she has sacrificed. Her self-knowledge sets her apart from the other characters, creates her independence, her true escape from the emotionally barren plains. This self-knowledge makes it possible for Sharon to see beneath the surface differences between her and Cora. Sharon even defends her when Caroline says that Cora has been less than an animal for not complaining about her life: “She could have . . . but she simply wouldn’t.”

The main male characters are less fully realized as they are not of primary importance in the lives of the Atkins women. Emerson feels superior to Cora although she has many talents that he lacks: reading, writing, understanding how to order from catalogs, making their chickens productive, covering the kitchen floor with linoleum. The narrow-minded Emerson is not a negative creation, getting along well with all the other Atkins women, but as a husband, he assumes the passive role traditionally associated with wives. Orion, who understands Cora much better than his brother does and admires her, is capable of greater emotion as well; his wife’s early death nearly destroys him.

Critical Context

Morris’s devoting his twentieth novel to a consideration of what it means to be a woman in twentieth century America is somewhat surprising, given the secondary status of women in most of his fiction. Women are presented as dominating their men in such works as Man and Boy (1951) and The Deep Sleep (1953), but beginning with One Day (1965), Morris’s women gradually start to establish their distinctive qualities, developing a logical progression to Sharon Rose Atkins. He creates Cora and Sharon because he understands women better than he did previously, not because he wants to write a feminist tract. With the exception of Love Among the Cannibals (1957), a rather sexy book by Morris’s standards, he eschews the fashionable.

The ninth of his novels to be set at least partially in Nebraska, Plains Song, for Female Voices completes Morris’s vision of the plains as a place with a profound grip on the emotional lives of its natives, these practical but passionless American dreamers. The Atkinses’ failure recalls that of Will Brady, the doomed egg dealer of The Works of Love (1952). Despite his criticisms of the deficiencies of the American character, both male and female, Morris always finds something admirable in his protagonists’ quests, as when Will Brady dies offering love to an indifferent world. Cora’s endurance in a world of loneliness and alienation is no small achievement.

Plains Song, for Female Voices joins The Works of Love, The Huge Season (1954), The Field of Vision (1956), Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), and Fire Sermon (1971) as one of Morris’s most notable novels, primarily through his portrait of Sharon and his celebration of her individuality. The choice between living a reasonably safe, conventional existence, and one involving challenges and independence—or degrees of independence—is a difficult one for any inhabitant of Wright Morris’s America.

Bibliography

Crump, Gail B. The Novels of Wright Morris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Crump explores Morris’s novels and provides an overview and analysis.

Dyck, Reginald. “Revisiting and Revising the West: Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Wright Morris’s Plains Song.” Modern Fiction Studies 36 (Spring, 1990): 24-38. Dyck compares the themes in novels by Cather and Morris.

Knoll, Robert. Conversations With Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. A collection of essays and interviews with Morris.

Madden, David. Wright Morris. New York: Twayne, 1965. Madden provides a critical and interpretive study of Morris with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography and complete notes and references. Useful for Morris’s work through the early 1960’s.

Morris, Wright. “Wright Morris and the American Century.” Interview by James Hamilton. Poets and Writers Magazine 25 (November-December, 1997): 23-31. Morris comments on his career and his writing and photography over a period of fifty years. He discusses creative imagination and the influence of the American nation on his writing.

Morris, Wright. “Wright Morris: The Art of Fiction CXXV.” Paris Review 33 (Fall, 1991): 52-94. Interview by Olga Carlisle and Jodie Ireland. A lengthy interview with Morris on various aspects of his life and career.

Morris, Wright. Writing My Life: An Autobiography. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1993. Morris reflects on his life and career as a photographer, essayist, novelist and critic.

Waldeland, Lynne. “Plains Song: Women’s Voices in the Fiction of Wright Morris.” Critique 24 (Fall, 1982): 7-20. A study of Morris’s portrayal of women in his novels.

Wydeven, Joseph J. Wright Morris Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. The first complete examination of the work of Wright Morris as a novelist and a photographer. Wydeven includes a portfolio of photographs by Morris along with a detailed analysis of the novels, criticism and memoir that Morris produced. Wydeven focuses on Morris’s principal theme of the American Dream and the promise of the American West.