Resurrecting Judith: Edith Summers Kelley, Weeds, and the Politics of Gender Christi Amato
aegis 2007 48
When Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds was published in 1923, protagonist Judith Pippinger Blackford’s tragic plight was described by one reviewer as the “common story of humanity” (Krutch 65). Nearly a century later, Kelley’s mastery still resonated with reviewers: in 1996, the New York Times hailed Weeds “a major work of American fiction” (Graebel). The real story of Weeds, however, unfolds in the seventy years of silence separating these laudatory reviews. Kelley’s compelling saga of the tedium, monotony and ultimate spiritual suffocation of Judith Pippinger Blackford plunged into obscurity after 1923, when Weeds sold so few copies, Kelley was unable even to pay back her publisher’s advance for the book.1 Ultimately, the critical and popular failure of Weeds is fashioned from many tangled threads, with contemporary social, political and academic movements as the primary contributors that would seal the novel’s fate: Judith would have to wait nearly a century for her story to be retold. When Weeds was rediscovered in 1972 and rescued from its long-imposed silence, Kelley’s passionate novel found new significance and meaning in an era that valued diminished and marginalized voices. The moving story of Judith Pippinger Blackford, the restless, yearning wife of a Kentucky tobacco tenant farmer reached through the generations to touch a mournful chord among readers and critics alike. Charlotte Margolis Goodman notes that as she taught the newly reprinted Weeds to class after class of college students[…]they were always surprised to discover, in a novel written so many years ago, that Kelley was very much aware of the of the ways in which the lives of women may be circumscribed by material circumstances, biological imperatives, and patriarchal attitudes. (354) Matthew Bruccoli, the English professor credited with rediscovering Weeds in 1972, called the work “a superb forgotten novel…a quiet masterpiece” deserving of a position in the American “realistic/naturalistic” tradition (335). When the Feminist Press reissued Weeds again in 1996, the New York Times Book Review praised the book for its “compassionate realism, its narrative pace, its sensitive evocation of character and for its sure literary craftsmanship” (Graebel). Indeed, it would seem Weeds had finally found its audience in the late twentieth century, and yet, the contemporary critical and popular appeal of Weeds raises compelling questions about its failure to succeed in its first publication: how could a novel with such obvious value and relevance to the American literary tradition slip into virtual anonymity? I One of the primary factors shaping the fate of Weeds was the shifting, chaotic social climate of the 1920s. The aftermath of World War I and the emerging desire to elevate litera-
