Small-town Styx: Edgar Lee Masters, Rural Confinement and Pastoral Subversion

ABSTRACT When Edgar Lee Masters wrote his obituary of small-town provincialism, Spoon River Anthology (1916), the literary movement known as the ‘revolt from the village’ was becoming increasingly defined. Writers like Mary Austin, Willa Cather and, later, Sherwood Anderson penned desolate portraits of rural America, disturbing the nineteenth century idyll of small-town America in favour of a community space ‘caught between industrial progress and gradual oblivion’ (Honaker Herron, 1971). This article explores rural confinement, spatial determinism, and psychological unfulfillment in Masters’ text, all of which are borne directly of Spoon River’s physical and metaphorical isolation. The spatial construction of Masters’ community will be scrutinised, tracing in its pastoral subversion and funereal conceit of the cemetery a melancholy commentary on small-town provincialism. Through consideration of the river as a physical and spiritual barrier, I will conclude that Masters’ text provides a rural portrait in which the small town is entirely beholden to this naturalistic symbol. By considering the various writers and ideologies that run concurrently with Masters, it will be contended that in this particular meeting of waters rural America becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate. Its inhabitants instead grow stagnant, the people embittered, and, in their narratives, a ‘buried life’ (Channell Hilfer, 1969) is dredged up from the silt.