Black Oxen (1923) simultaneously earned critical acclaim and prompted scorn and shock. Called drama, romance, and science fiction in its 1924 film release from Frank Lloyd Productions, the book went into 14 printings in a single year. The film’s popular stars, Corinne Griffin, Thomas S. Guise, and Clara Bow, as well as the controversy (including a condemnation from America’s pulpits) that the book generated, and Boni Liveright Publishers’ incredibly astute use of publicity, probably aided the book’s high sales, but even most critics eventually agreed that parts of the book represented some of Atherton’s best work.
As critic Charlotte McClure and reviewers have attested, part of Atherton’s literary strength—and weakness—rested in her refusal to fit any particular classification; she avoided pure realism, pure naturalism, and pure sentiment or romanticism, and assiduously shunned labeling herself or her work as regionalist. She observed and reported but never conclusively analyzed, and as a result, her fiction often contained irreconcilable ambiguities that the critics pounced upon as evidence of a lack of depth in her work. Somewhat like an impressionistic painter, she used the canvas of her characters to paint the portrait of the intellectual, social, and political America of her times.
Like many other American authors of her time, she could not escape that call to examine the past’s relationship to the present, the European influence in the Western world, and the rising tide of bourgeois influence amid the supposedly classless American society. And in her examinations, women constituted a class in themselves, a class she recognized as wrongly considered inferior by society. Atherton consciously strove not to follow tradition, and often that unwillingness to do so earned her fiction the labels “immoral,” “wild,” “uncouth,” “too sensational,” “unpredictable,” and “unladylike.” The critics most especially condemned her attitude about sexual freedom and her presentation of women who were stubborn nonconformists straying too far from the female ideal. Atherton maintained that her characters represented real women and her books showed the need for improving society and the way to do it.
Black Oxen stands as no exception to Atherton’s approach. Its leading character, Madame Marie Zattiany, arrives in Manhattan and intrigues its bourgeois social set because of her beauty and energy and her surprising similarities to a former member of their social set, Mary Ogden. In actuality, she is Mary Ogden, but because she has undergone the Steinach treatment, in which she has had her ovaries irradiated, her youthful appearance, energy, and sexuality belie her age of 58. Lee Clavering, a 30-year-old playwright, falls in love with her and proposes marriage, much to the dismay of the 18-year-old Janet Ogelthorpe, a flapper who cannot comprehend Clavering’s dismissal of her in favor of his attraction to an old woman. Ultimately, Marie Zattiany refuses to marry Clavering—who then settles for Janet Ogelthorpe—and instead agrees to marry Prince Hohenhaur so that she can return to Europe in a position of power and continue her relief work.
That power emerges as a crucial element of the theme of the text, for even as Marie Zattiany focuses on her beautiful, youthful, and sensual appearance, she wants that youth and sexuality primarily for the power and energy they can bring to her. “The bare idea of that old game of prowling sex fills [her] with ennui and disgust” (172); the power she seeks moves beyond mere physical attraction or physical acts of love. As Leider contends, in Black Oxen what conquers is not love but solitary strength; a strong woman can triumph even over time. The Steinach treatment’s glory is that in the Darwinian struggle to survive and dominate, it provides a competitive edge (303). Marie Zattiany clearly wins the competition with strength and purpose.
That competition, however, goes on not just among the women of the text. The novel presents as one of its essential themes the battle between past and present, between the morals of a previous era and those of the current one, and between the original concept of the new woman and the existing execution of that vision. These conflicts reveal themselves particularly in the juxtaposition of the female characters, with Janet Ogelthorpe representing the quintessential flapper whose behavior suggests “the limited use to which the flapper [is] putting her new freedom” (Forrey, 196); with Jane Ogelthorpe, Janet’s mother, symbolizing the Victorian woman unable to change or control her own life and who has “done [her] duty by the race . . . [has] brought up [her] sons to be honorable and self-respecting men . . . and [her] daughters in the best traditions of American womanhood” (193); and with Marie Zattiany standing for the woman of power, grace, and intelligence, who embraces outwardly the Victorian feminine ideal, but who inwardly commands the true ideal of the new woman of autonomy and strength.
While Leider, McClure, Forrey, Bookman’s critic Frederick Taber Cooper, a host of readers, and even Atherton’s friends Carl Van Vechten and James D. Phelan have found Black Oxen an autobiographical work based upon Atherton’s own experimentation with rejuvenation through hormone and X-ray treatments, the book goes well beyond mere autobiography and commentary on vanity and appearances to reveal an analysis of a post–World War I America caught up in the exterior elements of life and being to the exclusion of the interior and the intellect, in what Atherton condemns as America’s “lack of brains” (Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist, 562) in a “world falling to ruins” (345). Her heroine gives up the romantic love of Clavering so that she might have the power to do more than raise and care for a man and a child, so that she might have the power to use her “splendid mental gifts, [her] political genius . . . [to become] the most useful woman in Europe” (322–323). That usefulness makes of woman more than a Victorian conformist or a superficial flapper; it makes of her a shaper of the world.
SOURCES
Atherton, Gertrude. Adventures of a Novelist. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
———. Black Oxen. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923.
Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Bruce, John. Gaudy Century: The Story of San Francisco’s Hundred Years of Robust Journalism. New York: Random House, 1948.
Cowie, Alexander. The Rise of the American Novel. New York: American Book, 1948.
Crow, Charles L. Itinerary Criticism: Essays on California Writers. Bowling Green, Ohio: Press of Bowling Green, 1978.
Cummins, Ella Sterling. “California Writers and Literature.” In The Story of the Files. n.p.: California World’s Fair Commission, Columbia Exposition, 1893.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Forrey, Carolyn. “Gertrude Atherton and the New Woman.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1971.
Leider, Emily Wortis. California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991.
McClure, Charlotte S. “A Bibliography of the Works by and about Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton.” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 9 (1976): 119–126.
———. Gertrude Atherton. No. 23 of Boise State University Western Writers Series, edited by Wayne Chatterton, James H. Maguire, and Dale K. Boyer. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1976.
———. Gertrude Atherton. Edited by David J. Nordlon. TUSAS 324 of Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
———. “Gertrude Atherton and Her San Francisco: A Wayward Writer and a Wayward Paradise.” IN (1995): 73–95.
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