Narration as Pragmatism in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground

r' o satisfy her desire not to know, but to live, Ellen GlasI gow read hungrily in philosophy.' Such intense emphasis upon action and experience in a reticent woman who otherwise so obviously valued the life of the mind marks Glasgow as by nature a pragmatist. Though she admits to a pragmatic view only on the question of will,2 Glasgow is, in fact, rather more thoroughly pragmatic than she claims. In What Pragmatism Means (1907), William James's general description of the pragmatist sounds almost like a description of Dorinda Oakley in Barren Ground (1926), which is, according to Glasgow, her most autobiographical work. A pragmatist, James says, . . . away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.3 Even without Glasgow's allusions to pragmatism in Barren Ground, a reader might recognize these pragmatic features of Dorinda's mind

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