Angle of Repose Read Online Free PDF Page A

liberation provided by the feminist revolution, Susan Burling Ward goes beyond the modern woman by having liberated herself. There is connected to this, of course, the theme of the conflict between traditionally male and female roles and values, here exacerbated by the strains and extremes of western life. In the Wards we have to some extent the stereotypical nineteenth-century American man and woman—the man mostly silent and devoted to making his way in the world, and the woman loquacious and socially conscious. Their complexity raises them above the stereotypes, but the basic conflict in roles and values remains.
    Susan’s husband, Oliver, is also a complex character, but since we see him only indirectly, he remains throughout a somewhat shadowy figure. We do know that he is quiet, competent, ambitious, and hard-working. After nearly five years of acquaintance, he proposes to Susan. He has been trying to make his way in the world to be worthy of her. He worships his wife in an old-fashioned way, but is withal a man’s man. Lyman says of him,
    The silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminiscences to speak for him. I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man. He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out.
    His complexity only comes through Susan’s reflections on him, which are decidedly mixed.
    Before their marriage she is attracted to him because “he had an air of quiet such as she had known in men like her father, men who worked with animals.” But after their marriage she frequently compares him unfavorably to other men, particularly Thomas Hudson, the man she would have liked to have married and who marries her best friend, Augusta. But even more overtly and painfully she compares him to her husband’s assistant, Frank Sargent, with whom she falls in love. In reaction to all his failures, Oliver starts drinking, much to his wife’s disgust:
    “Doesn’t it humiliate you to think that you can’t resist that temptation when someone like Frank, living out on the railroad with the roughest sort of man, never touches a drop? Why can’t you be like Frank?”
    And that was the greatest mistake of all. “Because I’m not Frank,” Oliver said, staring at her reflected face. “Maybe you wish I was.”
    Lyman decides that Susan “must unconsciously have agreed with [her husband’s] judgment that she was higher and finer than he. I wonder if there was some moment when she fully comprehended and appreciated him?” He remains somewhat mysterious to us, almost mythic in stature. He suffers the slings and arrows of many misfortunes, both personal and professional, silently. One wound that has surely grown and festered over the years is his wife’s disappointment in his inability to achieve the material success that would have raised them socially. He can do his job well, but his sense of duty leads him to pass up opportunities in order to stay with his family, and he is too honest to compete in the helter-skelter western world of get-rich-quick exploitation. At heart, Lyman tells us, he was a builder, not a raider.
    This is a thoughtful book with a rich panoply of characters, both major and minor, and one that explores many themes, themes that bring the novel into the center of our culture. Like The Great Gatsby, it helps us define who we, as a people in this new land, are. Oliver in his gallant romanticism is our Gatsby, and Susan in her own romantic snobbish world is our Daisy, and ne’er the twain shall meet until at the end they find their angle of repose. We have all, to use Fitzgerald’s words, looked toward the “fresh, green breast of the New World,” and we all believe, or would like to believe, in the American Dream, although we each may define that dream in our own way. We may, like Willie Loman, be