Edna Ferber—biography
Ferber was born August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, Jacob Charles Ferber, and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Julia (Neumann) Ferber, of German Jewish descent.
The Ferbers had moved to Kalamazoo from Chicago to open a dry goods store, and Edna's older sister Fannie was born there three years earlier.
Ferber's father was not adept at business, and the family moved often during Ferber's childhood. From Kalamazoo, they returned to Chicago for a year, and then moved to Ottumwa, Iowa, where they resided from 1890 to 1897 (ages 5 to 12 for Ferber).
Edna Ferber—biography
In Ottumwa, Ferber and her family faced brutal anti-Semitism, including adult males verbally abusing, mocking and spitting on her on days when she brought lunch to her father, often mocking her in a Yiddish accent.
According to Ferber, her years in Ottumwa "must be held accountable for anything in me that is hostile toward the world."
During this time, Ferber's father began to lose his eyesight, necessitating costly and ultimately unsuccessful treatments.
At the age of 12, Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and later briefly attended Lawrence University.
After graduation, Ferber planned to study elocution, with vague thoughts of someday becoming an actor, but her family could not afford to send her to college.
Edna Ferber—biography
On the spur of the moment, she took a job as a cub reporter at the Appleton Daily Crescent and subsequently moved to the Milwaukee Journal.
In early 1909 Ferber suffered a bout of anemia and returned to Appleton to recuperate. She never resumed her career as a reporter, although she subsequently covered the 1920 Republican National Convention and 1920 Democratic National Convention for the United Press Association.
While Ferber was recovering, she began writing and selling short stories to various magazines, and in 1911 she published her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed.
In 1912, a collection of her short stories was published in a volume entitled Buttered Side Down. In her autobiography, Ferber wrote:
In that day, and for a girl in her early twenties, they were rather hard tough stories. The book got good reviews. I was startled and grimly pleased when some of the reviewers said that obviously these stories had been written by a man who had taken a feminine nom de plume as a hoax. I have always thought that a writing style should be impossible of sex determination; I don't think the reader should be able to say whether a book has been written by a man or a woman.
Edna Ferber—biography
In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big. Ferber initially believed her draft of what would become So Big lacked a plot, glorified failure, and had a subtle theme that could easily be overlooked. When she sent the book to her usual publisher, Doubleday, she was surprised to learn that he greatly enjoyed the novel. This was reflected by the several hundreds of thousands of copies of the novel sold to the public.
Following the award, the novel was made into a silent film starring Colleen Moore that same year. A remake followed in 1932, starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent, with Bette Davis in a supporting role. A 1953 version of So Big starring Jane Wyman is the most popular version to modern audiences.
Riding the popularity of So Big, Ferber's next novel, Show Boat, was just as successful. Shortly after its release, composer Jerome Kern proposed turning it into a musical. Ferber was shocked, thinking it would be transformed into a typical light entertainment of the 1920s. It was not until Kern explained that he and Oscar Hammerstein wanted to create a different type of musical that Ferber granted him the rights and it premiered on Broadway in 1927, and has been revived 8 times.
Edna Ferber—biography
Her 1952 novel, Giant, became the basis of the 1956 movie, starring Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean and Rock Hudson.
Ferber died at her home in New York City, of stomach cancer, at age 82. She left her estate to her sister and nieces.
Ferber never married, had no children, and is not known to have engaged in a romance. In her early novel Dawn O'Hara, the title character's aunt remarks,
"Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling." Ferber did take a maternal interest in the career of her niece Janet Fox, an actress who performed in the original Broadway casts of Ferber's plays Dinner at Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936).
Ferber was known for being outspoken and having a quick wit. On one occasion, she led other Jewish guests in leaving a house party after learning the host was antisemitic. Once, after Noel Coward joked about how her suit made her resemble a man, she replied, "So does yours."
Edna Ferber—biography
Starting in 1922, Ferber began to visit Europe once or twice annually for thirteen or fourteen years. During this time and unlike most Americans, she became troubled by the rise of the Nazi Party and its spreading of the antisemitic prejudice she had faced in her childhood. She commented on this saying,
"It was a fearful thing to see a continent – a civilization – crumbling before one's eyes. It was a rapid and seemingly inevitable process to which no one paid any particular attention."
Her fears greatly influenced her work, which often featured themes of racial and cultural discrimination. Her 1938 autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, originally included a spiteful dedication to Adolf Hitler which stated:
To Adolf Hitler, who has made me a better Jew and a more understanding human being, as he has of millions of other Jews, this book is dedicated in loathing and contempt.
While this was changed by the time of the book's publication, it still alluded to the Nazi threat.
Edna Ferber—Algonquin Round Table
Ferber was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle," as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country. Members and associates of the Algonquin Round Table ca. 1919 were Art Samuels, Harpo Marx, Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and Robert Benchley. Other members included Noel Coward, Tallulah Bankhead, Herman Mankiewicz, Robert Sherwood, and Frank Sullivan.
In its ten years of association, the Round Table and a number of its members acquired national reputations, both for their contributions to literature and for their sparkling wit. Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution.
Ferber collaborated with Round Table member George S. Kaufman on several plays presented on Broadway: Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner At Eight (1932), The Land Is Bright (1941), Stage Door (1936), and Bravo! (1948).
Publications
Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed (1911)
Fanny Herself (1917)
The Girls (1921)
So Big (1924) (won Pulitzer Prize)
Show Boat (1926)
Cimarron (1930)
American Beauty (1931)
Come and Get It (1935)
Saratoga Trunk (1941)
Great Son (1945)
Giant (1952)
Ice Palace (1958)
Publications
She also composed a number of novellas, and short stories collections, two autobiographies, as well as 9 plays, often written in collaboration with other playwrights.
Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination, ethnic or otherwise.
Ferber's works often concerned small subsets of American culture, and sometimes took place in exotic locations she had visited but was not intimately familiar with, such as Texas or Alaska.
She thus helped to highlight the diversity of American culture to those who did not have the opportunity to experience it.
So Big—from Random House
In her breakthrough novel So Big, Edna Ferber follows the life of the unforgettable Selina Peake DeJong, a widowed farmer who through force of will transforms her hardscrabble property into a thriving business in a Dutch immigrant community outside of Chicago.
Through her vivid portrait of the free-spirited Selina’s life and times, Ferber highlights the frictions between
market and farm,
city and country,
expectations for women and men,
American capitalism and subsistence living,
the pursuit of money and the longing for beauty and art.
When she finished writing her novel, Ferber confessed to her publisher, “Who would be interested in a novel about a middle-aged woman in a calico dress with wispy hair and bad teeth, grubbing on a little truck farm south of Chicago?” It turned out that millions of readers would; So Big became the best-selling novel of 1925, [won a Pulitzer], and has remained in print ever since its publication.
Cast of characters—Selina Peake DeJong
Selina Peake DeJong begins her life, somewhat privileged by an indulgent father, a gambler, killed when Selina is just 19. He described life as "an adventure."
To support herself, she accepts a job as a schoolteacher in the Dutch community of High Prairie, just outside Chicago. On her trip there, when she describes the fields of cabbages as beautiful, her remark elicits laughter from the pragmatic, work-worn Dutch, but her ability to seek and find beauty in the most unlikely of circumstances pervades her entire life.
She wins the heart of Pervis DeJong when he pays an outrageous price for her box lunch at a church auction. Becoming physically scarred by the backbreaking farm work does not eradicate Selina’s fun-loving spirit, indomitable courage, and shrewd ability to judge character and values.
Dallas O'Mara—young artist Dirk meets and hires for bank promotion; much like his mother. But she loves Roelf.
Cast of characters—Selina Peake DeJong
Even as an old woman, her son Dirk’s secretary claims, she has an air about her that is better than style. Although she loves Dirk above all else, she considers herself a failure because he has compromised his desire to become an architect for more immediate financial success as a banker. She is not despondent over the partial blame she accepts for her son’s choices. She receives joy from life on the farm itself and from the work of a former student, Roelf Pool, an artist and son of the first family with whom she lived.
She experiences life as “velvet,” the legacy her father gave her by encouraging her to live life richly whether it brought good or bad.
Antje Waagmeester Paarlberg
Antje Waagmeester Paarlberg is known as the inspiration for Selina in the novel So Big. Chicago area author Edna Ferber used South Holland, Illinois, its pioneers and onion farms as background for her 1924 novel about an ambitious widow in a Midwestern Dutch American farming community.
Antje Waagmeester married Klaas Paarlberg in their birthplace of Warmenhuizen and settled as farmers in nearby Spanbroek where they would get eight children. In 1847 Klaas, Antje, and their seven surviving children set off from the Netherlands to America in search of better fortunes. They felt that the State Church was too liberal and taxes unfair.
Klaas died of pleurisy during the voyage and was buried at sea; he was 43. Antje continued to America with their children although the ship's captain offered to take them back to the Netherlands but she refused to go. The determined 'Widow Paarlberg,' as she is referred to in South Holland, persevered even after the youngest child also died. The baby was buried in a small cemetery near Lincoln Park.
Antje Waagmeester Paarlberg
Antje and her remaining six children settled near other Dutch pioneers 20–30 miles south of Chicago, buying eighty acres of land at seven dollars an acre. There she built a log cabin plastered with clay near what would become the village of South Holland, Illinois. Eventually all of her children acquired land in the area and developed farms.
Ferber highly fictionalized Antje's life and the Paarlberg family believes that she is somewhat misrepresented in So Big. South Holland's Dutch descendants take exception to the literary license Ferber took with the character of the widow, creating a pushy flirtatious personality that South Hollanders say was nothing like the real Widow Paarlberg. Ferber gives a nod to the real Antje Paarlberg who appears in the novel as the "Widow Parlenberg." The book Lest We Forget by Henry Paarlberg, one of Klaas and Antje's grandchildren, tells the family's version of the Paarlberg family's difficult journey.
Cast of characters—Pervis DeJong
Pervis DeJong is a strong, kind, poorly educated Dutch farmer who follows the practices of his tradition and can therefore barely make a living as a truck farmer. He buys the beautifully arranged but scanty boxed supper that Selina prepared for an auction, paying an exorbitant ten dollars he cannot afford.
Pervis then asks Selina to teach him to read and figure. His is the least successful farm in the community, but even so Selina falls in love with the gentle giant. He refuses to initiate any of the farming changes she suggests, however, and in his own stubborn way persists in doing things as they had always been done, hastening his death from pneumonia.
He says that what is good enough for his father is good enough for him.
And he looked upon conversation as a convenience not as a pastime.
Cast of characters—Dirk DeJong—"So Big"
Nicknamed "So Big" as a baby, Dirk is charming, intelligent, though average as opposed to exceptional; he is however exceptionally handsome and has a natural as opposed to practiced way with people.
Unlike his mother, whose character never wavers, Dirk makes choices within relatively easy circumstances that determine who he will become. Although certain that he doesn't want the family farm, he's uncertain about his future profession and takes a "generalist" course at university. He develops a natural friendship with a farm girl but abandons her when his fraternity doesn't approve. He studies architecture at Cornell because he despises the buildings the newly moneyed have built, but he cannot make a living as an architect when he joins a firm after college. The war intervenes, and after that he becomes a bank bond salesman, a job that pays well, and adopts the lifestyle of the rich.
Unable to give up this lifestyle, complete with Japanese servant, he abandons architecture. A disappointed Selina claims that he has sold the love of beauty inherited from her for a mess of pottage-success measured only by money.
He also settles for a liaison with Paula, the fabulously wealthy married daughter of his mother’s old friend, Julie, instead of the love he would have preferred, Dallas O’Mara, an artist much like his mother. His choices stunt his life to only “so big.”
Cast of characters—Paula Arnold Storm
The granddaughter of butcher turned meatpacking giant, August Hempel, daughter of Julie, Selina’s schoolfriend, and finally wife of a Chicago businessman far older than she, Paula has known Dirk from their childhood. She's in love with him, but possessive and controlling.
When it looks like Dirk will always been a struggling architect, she marries a much older wealthy Theodore Storm. Although she loves Dirk, she can't give up her wealthy lifestyle.
Later, she controls Dirk’s financial career by possessive manipulation. She is a slim, dark, vivacious, slinky socialite. Her unhappiness is betrayed by her hot, nervous, twisty hands. She is a natural contrast both to Selina and to Dallas O’Mara, the artist with whom Dirk falls in love to no avail.
Cast of characters—August Hempel
He arranges the teaching position for Selina at the beginning of the novel, and makes additional arrangements thereafter. He's Julie's father and Paula's grandfather.
"At forty-seven, single-handed, he was to establish the famous Hempel Packing Company. At fifty he was the power in the yards, and there were Hempel branches in Kansas City, Omaha, Denver.
At sixty you saw the name of Hempel plastered over packing sheds, factories, and canning plants all the way from Honolulu to Portland. You read: Don’t Say Ham: Say Hempel’s. Hempel products ranged incredibly from pork to pineapple; from grease to grape-juice.
An indictment meant no more to Hempel, the packer, than an injunction for speeding to you. Something of his character may be gleaned from the fact that farmers who had known the butcher at forty still addressed this millionaire, at sixty, as Aug.
At sixty-five he took up golf and beat his son-in-law, Michael Arnold. A magnificent old pirate, sailing the perilous commercial seas of the American ’90s before commissions, investigations, and inquisitive senate insisted on applying whitewash to the black flag of trade."
Cast of characters—Maartje Pool
Wife of Klaas, mother to Geertje and Jozina, the "two pigtails." and to Roelf
"Selina suddenly saw that she, too, was young. The bad teeth, the thin hair, the careless dress, the littered kitchen, the harassed frown—above all these, standing out clearly, appeared the look of a girl."
When Selina was teaching Roelf:
Sometimes Maartje, hearing their young laughter, would come to the shed door and stand there a moment, hugging her arms in her rolled apron and smiling at them, uncomprehending but companionable. “You make fun, h’m?”
At her death
It had brought neither peace nor youth to her face, as it so often does. Selina, looking down at the strangely still figure that had been so active, so bustling, realized that for the first time in the years she had known her she was seeing Maartje Pool at rest. It seemed incredible that she could lie there, the infant in her arms, while the house was filled with people and there were chairs to be handed, space to be cleared, food to be cooked and served. Sitting there with the other High Prairie women Selina had a hideous feeling that Maartje would suddenly rise up and take things in charge; rub and scratch with capable fingers the spatters of dried mud on Klaas Pool’s black trousers (he had been in the yard to see to the horses); quiet the loud wailing of Geertje and Jozina; pass her gnarled hand over Roelf’s wide-staring tearless eyes; wipe the film of dust from the parlour table that had never known a speck during her régime.
“You can’t run far enough,” Maartje had said. “Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”
Cast of characters
Klaas Pool—successful truck farmer with whom Selina boards when she accepts the teaching position. Two years after Maartje dies in childbirth, he marries the widow Paarlenberg.
Roelf—son, 12 years old when he meets Selina, but works on the farm rather than attending school. Like Dirk, he doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps and become a truck farmer.
Privately, at home, Selina educates him, giving him books to read, like Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers, appreciating the craftsmanship of his woodworking. He carved a chest for Selina when she married.
At the auction, he bids on her dinner box, but loses to Pervis.
Although his father refers to him as "dumb," he has an "eye for beauty." When his mother dies, he runs away, to France, only to return years later as a successful, well-known sculptor.
The "Lost Generation"
The term “lost generation” came from a statement: “All of you young people who served in the war. . . . You are all a lost generation,” writer Gertrude Stein said to a young Ernest Hemingway in the years after World War I, according to his account years later in A Moveable Feast.
The phrase “lost generation” described the disillusionment felt by many, especially intellectuals and creatives, after the death and carnage of World War I. The loss of faith in traditional values and ideals led many who came of age during World War I to become hedonistic, rebellious, and aimless—“lost.” This cynicism and disillusionment defined the literary and creative landscape of the 1920s.
Among the literary names include: Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Henry Miller, and others less famous.
Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlpbKe6tbWA
PBS—Inside the Works of Edna Ferber
https://www.pbs.org/video/the-works-of-edna-ferber-gwkvku/
Question for discussion
Ferber is known for her strong female characters. What kind of character is Selina Peake DeJong. This novel focuses on a sizable portion of her life. What does that life represent?
Question for discussion
Most of the characters in this novel have contrasting views on how to live life, or on how to achieve the "American dream." When she's young, Simeon Peake tells Selina:
I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. . . . Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things."
How does the novel respond to this philosophy? How would you describe the "life philosophy" of other characters?
Question for discussion
At the end of this novel, Dirk is flopped on his bed, having realized that Dallas loves Roelf, will never love him. But then his phone rings, his servant knocks on the door to tell him it's Paula.
What do you see in this ending? One reviewer found it quite depressing.
Questions for discussion
This novel is classic American fiction in its setting, contrasting the polarity between rural and urban, or High Prairie with its hard-scrabbling Dutch immigrant truck farmers and Chicago with its high-style elegant homes—French chateaus or Italian villas—built by newly-rich business magnates who lunch in opulent restaurants but still speak in their native vernacular.
What's the theme here, so often played out in American novels.
Questions for discussion
Strangely perhaps, Ferber has nevertheless been described as a "middlebrow" writer. That sounds pejorative. Is it? What do you think reviewers mean by that?
Critics and reviewers
"Edna Ferber's women"—Ann Abramson—Georgetown Univ. thesis.
In the early years of the 20th century, Edna Ferber created female characters who
struggled again the constraints of society's traditional female roles,
who were the first in their nontraditional professions, and
who achieved their own version of the American dream.
Edna Ferber also revisited American history with stories that highlighted women's contributions to America.
Edna Ferber was a "middlebrow" modern writer whose literary output had powerful cultural agency. She used small town Midwestern settings to explore and resolve the female conflict between commitment to family and community and to self-actualization.
Her novels were written during a time of significant change for women in America when these stories of independent, successful women serve as both model and inspiration for Ferber's large female audience.
Her bedrock belief in America and American women allowed her and her female characters to interpret the American dream through a female lens.
Edna Ferber's women—Ann Abramson—Georgetown Univ. thesis.
So Big contrasts the bitter struggle between old hard-working pioneer values and new post WWI fast money and materialism. By placing the novel in the Victorian era, she extols their virtues and highlights the evolving changes in society after the war. It was the first of Ferber's novels to explore the legacy of the pioneer woman in the development of the nation.
With her novels, Ferber reached ultimate success, she has reached the apotheosis of her spiritual journey, not in heading out west but by heading into her own 25 acres.
Abramson cites Kristina Groover, The Wilderness Within:
Substituting a garden for the wilderness reinforces the idea that the spiritual may be located in quite ordinary spaces of everyday lives rather than on the horizon.
Edna Ferber's women"—Ann Abramson—Georgetown Univ. thesis.
J. E. Smyth, Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History
Says that many feminist historians of women on the American frontier have argued that instead of freeing women from social constraints the West isolated women from other women, heightened their vulnerability to men, and increased their domestic work load.
Selina's sense of personal and physical isolation caused her to "mismarry," but rather than a tragedy she saw this as an opportunity to embrace life, the landscape, and America's glorious future for productivity. And women work harder because they do the work of both sexes
Selina has played a part in settling the Midwest and modernizing agriculture
"Selina shares the re-envisioning of the American frontier landscape and the role of women in developing that ideal."
She does not succumb to the material trappings of the dream but stays close to the land and her bedrock values of hard work, self reliance, and discipline
Breakout room question
Reviewers have differing opinions on the work of Edna Ferber. Some have called her novels "epic"; others "middlebrow." What do you think?
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
The first-generation Jewish American novelist exposed entrenched prejudices of her day. A reissue of The Girls introduces her wit to new readers.
What could be simpler than Old Maid? That’s the card game where players vie not to be the person at the end stuck with the Joker while making matches of everything else. The implications of the game and its name could hardly be clearer: to end up unmarried and childless is to lose out on all that life has to offer—to be a prim, fussy person, sexless and repressed and pitiable.
Even now, in the twenty-first century, when more adults, both men and women, are going through life unattached by matrimony than ever before, women who never marry still find themselves pegged—sometimes by peers, sometimes by family, and almost always by pop culture—as odd or eccentric at best, pathetic and rejected at worst. Decidedly not winners.
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
Which is why, a century after its initial publication, Edna Ferber’s deft, affectionate 1921 novel The Girls refreshes with its exuberant focus upon not one but three old maids. From the first page, Ferber breezes us into their lives:
It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls pell-mell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that they will not even glance up when you enter the room or leave it; or to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch, and story.
This last would mean beginning with Great-Aunt Charlotte Thrift, spinster, aged seventy-four; thence to her niece and namesake Lottie Payson, spinster, aged thirty-two; finishing with Lottie’s niece and namesake Charley Kemp, spinster, aged eighteen and a half—you may be certain nobody ever dreamed of calling her Charlotte. If you are led by all this to exclaim, aghast, “A story about old maids!”— you are right. It is.
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
Ferber, who never married and had no children herself, even dedicates The Girls to her dear friend Lillian Adler, a fellow spinster, albeit one “who shies at butterflies but not at life.” That latter phrase, “but not at life,” turns out to be thematically crucial, for this is absolutely a book about old maids, but it is not the dreary narrative a reader might expect.
These three characters, though unwed and child-free, are not isolated but enmeshed in their families, friendships, and surrounding communities. Granted, to greater or lesser extents, each finds herself within a sexist and claustrophobic societal atmosphere in which any little act of self-assertion can feel like a leap from a precipice.
Yet Ferber is not interested in cautionary tales of shrinking violets, favoring instead women who, out of necessity or desire or both, discover that meaningful work and recognition outside the home can unlock the door to a meaningful life.
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
Early on, while living in Chicago during the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath, practically under house arrest after a perceived romantic indiscretion, the eldest Charlotte—lively and passionate yet suppressed by her respectability-obsessed Victorian mother—finishes sewing a phenomenal quilt, one that “became quite famous; a renowned work of art.” Visitors, the narrator tells us, ask Charlotte about its progress, “as a novelist is sounded about an opus with which he is struggling or a painter his canvas,” prompting the quilter to explain, “This one has a purple satin center, you see. I always think purple is so rich, don’t you? Then the next row will be white uncut velvet. Doesn’t it have a sumptuous sound! Next blue velvet and the last row orange-colored silk.”
This precious object and its method of composition—patches and colors that repeat and intersect to create a bigger pattern—resurface throughout the book, becoming an analog for Ferber’s nimble and elegant assembly of her own saga. Moving back and forth through time, she highlights the rhymes in the lives of the elderly Aunt Charlotte, the middle-aged Lottie, and the galoshed and rebellious young flapper, Charley. The similarities and differences among these three women and their love for one another provides the thread that binds the narrative.
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
Quilts, historically considered to be women’s work, have almost always been viewed as a lesser art form than the traditionally male-dominated pursuits of painting, sculpture, and even literature, as Ferber, a so-called “well-dressed lady novelist,” was well aware. In “Edna Ferber and the Problems of the Middlebrow,” Elyse Vigiletti observes that Ferber’s 1968 obituary in the New York Times
hailed her as ‘the greatest American woman novelist of her day’—no mean designation, despite the gender qualifier, considering that her ‘day’ included such figures as Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Willa Cather—making much of the fact that her books were ‘required reading in schools and universities.’ Yet, like much contemporaneous writing about her, it also registers a certain reservation about her long-term import, conceding that ‘her novels were not profound,’ damning them with the faint praise of ‘minor classics.’
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
Ferber uses Aunt Charlotte’s quilt as a recurring reminder of the perils of undervaluing not just women’s labor, but women themselves. When at last Charlotte completes her masterpiece, “lined with turkey red and bound with red ribbon,” she lets her friends persuade her to exhibit it at the fair, where it takes first prize. “A day of great triumph for Charlotte Thrift,” the narrator sums up, adding that “the prize was a basket worth fully eight dollars.”
In her review of Eliza McGraw’s 2014 book, Edna Ferber’s America, in “Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature,” Lori Harrison-Kahan observes how the author was scorned both for being a woman and for being a Jew, noting that “a chorus of critical voices, most of them male” dismissed Ferber’s “crowd-pleasing plots as well as her hyperbolic, though accessible, writing style.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald refused even to “read her wildly popular stories, derisively labeling her one of the ‘Yiddish descendants of O. Henry.’” In his 1960 Partisan Review essay “Masscult and Midcult,” Dwight Macdonald offered his notorious assessment of middlebrow writers, stating that their work “really isn’t culture at all” but “a parody of High Culture;” he placed Ferber at the top of his “list of writers who should not be taken seriously.”
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
One hopes that these men, if they were still alive, would be embarrassed at having made such fatuous statements. Regardless, they were missing out. Ferber’s prose is a delight, and now, with Belt Publishing’s reissue of The Girls, more readers will get the opportunity to see that.
This three-protagonist story relies on a masterful omniscience, which skips like a stone across Lake Michigan, hopping thrillingly from mind to mind. Set in 1916 but published in 1921, so too does the narration capitalize on the insights available to its slightly retrospective perspective.
In reference to World War I, for instance, a minor character says, “We’re a peace-loving nation. . . . We simply don’t believe in war. Barbaric.” Both the narrator and reader know how tragically misguided this speaker is. Moreover, when the narrator mentions the struggle for suffrage, readers are aware, as the fictional women are not, that they will finally be granted the right to vote in 1920, after the novel ends but before it is published. Ferber delivers this deep socio-historical sweep with a deceptively light touch that enhances the novel’s underlying seriousness while also keeping the plot moving.
The Girls—from Jstor Daily
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
Near the book’s surprising and satisfying conclusion, Lottie tells her kindred Charlottes about a man she met in Paris during the Great War. Of this man’s most attractive quality, she declares, “They call it a sense of humor, I suppose, but it’s more than that. It’s the most delightful thing in the world, and if you have it you don’t need anything else.”
Ferber displays this quality in abundance, as well as plenty of that “anything else.” Because here’s the thing: this book is funny, but with a genuine generosity of spirit that never reduces even its most ridiculous figures to total buffoons. The dominant outlook feels loving and compassionate. And its gentle mockery of its major and minor characters’ blind spots and foibles blends with its profound understanding.
Edna Ferber Revisited—Kathleen Rooney
In an article titled "Edna Ferber Revisited," author Kathleen Rooney writes:
Ferber perfectly captures the unfulfilled feeling within so many conventional people and the petty tyranny a forcefully normal family member can exert over those in her orbit, from Aunt Charlotte’s authoritarian mother to Carrie Payson, Lottie’s mother. In addition to fairly running Lottie into the ground with her domineering demands, the latter is “the sort of person who does slammy flappy things in a room where you happened to be breakfasting, or writing, or reading; things at which you could not express annoyance and yet which annoyed you to the point of frenzy.”
Through a gradual accumulation of events and encounters, Ferber shows how a bit of resistance and freethinking, especially when they are supported by other female family members, can set off a series of earthquakes that can shift a household’s—and a society’s—entire geography. This trifecta of Charlottes proves that sisterhood is indeed powerful, maybe even more so when it comes from beyond your actual siblings.
Edna Ferber Revisited—Kathleen Rooney
Certainly, Ferber’s approach—critical but forgiving to individual people and America at large—stems largely from who she was as a person and the way in which she moved through the world as a feme sole. A firsthand expert on the old maid lifestyle herself, Ferber was never known to have had a romantic or sexual relationship.
But far from being a sad, sere figure whom life was passing by, she was vibrant, indefatigable, witty, and successful, a member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for So Big, another wonderful Chicago novel. She saw that book eventually adapted into one silent picture and two talkies.
Her 1926 novel Show Boat was made into the famous 1927 musical, and Cimarron (1930), Giant (1952), and The Ice Palace (1958) were all adapted into films as well. When novelist Joseph Conrad encountered her on a visit to the States in 1923, he wrote that, “it was a great pleasure to meet Miss Ferber. The quality of her work is [as] undeniable as her personality.”
Edna Ferber Revisited—Kathleen Rooney
As Ann R. Shapiro notes in Shofar, Ferber was
“a Jewish feminist, long before critics paid much attention to either gender or ethnicity.”
Ferber’s frank descriptions of class stratifications, ethnic divides, and sexism illustrate how these snobberies and preconceptions shape not only individual lives but the life of a metropolis.
At one point, Lottie drives downtown in the family’s “ancient electric” to help Emma Barton, a friend in a position rare for its time of being a female judge, rehabilitate a wayward girl. She catches “her breath a little at the spaciousness and magnificence of those blocks between Twelfth and Randolph. The new Field Columbian Museum, a white wraith, rose out of the lake mist at her right.” Ferber notes that Lottie
“always felt civic when driving down Michigan,”
which enhances the marvel we feel a few pages later when Ferber writes just as convincingly about
“all that vast stratum of submerged servers over whom the flood of humanity sweeps in a careless torrent leaving no one knows what sediment of rich knowledge.”
Edna Ferber Revisited—Kathleen Rooney
With subtle characterization and wry sympathy of tone, Ferber shows in The Girls that the underestimated often have a richer life than anyone who fails to look closely might suspect, and that there are fates far worse than never marrying a husband and sacrificing oneself to a nuclear family.
The phrase “beloved woman” recurs in this novel, referring to the radiance that a woman exudes when a man has chosen her to treasure above others. Each time this coveted glow appears, however, Ferber presents us with an occasion to wonder: Could a woman be beloved in other ways? Not disdained or taken for granted based upon her ability to be selected by a husband, but loved more broadly, respected for everything else inherent to her being?
Next Week:
The mystery as genre