Plains Song: For Female Voices
by Wright Morris
Summary
Cora comes west from Ohio at the turn of the century to marry Emerson Atkins, a Nebraska homesteader she barely knows, and on her wedding night she bites her own hand through to the bone. That wound, quietly carried for the rest of her life, is the novel's founding image: what the plains asked of its women, and what it cost them to pay.
Morris then does something almost no male novelist of his generation attempted: he hands the whole history of the American farm century to its women. Cora, plain, upright and unreachable, builds her security out of chores and silence, bearing one daughter, Madge, and raising alongside her a niece, Sharon Rose, who watches Cora's life with mounting horror and flees it, to music study in Lincoln, then Chicago, then the East, unmarried by conviction. The novel moves back and forth between the two lines across the decades, the daughters who stayed and the ones who left, and refuses to referee: Cora's endurance and Sharon's escape are both answers, and both cost more than they advertised.
Almost nothing happens that a plot summary could hold, weddings, funerals, visits home, a farmhouse slowly emptying, and everything happens: the whole transformation of rural America, registered in kitchens. The Atkins family runs to daughters, generation after generation, and the husbands stay minor characters on purpose; Madge's girls and their girls carry the line down to a present none of the founders would recognise, and the book's title is exact, a song scored for those voices alone.
Around two hundred and thirty pages, spare and exact.
Best for readers who want the prairie novel Cather's granddaughters would recognise, written late, in a minor key, by a master closing his account.
Historical Context & Significance
Plains Song won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1981, twenty four years after Wright Morris's The Field of Vision had won it, one of the longest spans between wins in the prize's history, and it was his final novel: he was seventy, closing a shelf of more than thirty books, and the award functioned as the American literary world's farewell salute to its most respected unread man.
The subtitle, For Female Voices, declared the project: critics who had spent decades noting that Morris's plains were a masculine country read the book as a deliberate answer to his own life's work, the same farmhouses and stoic silences seen at last from the kitchen side. Reviewers, Wayne Booth prominent among them, treated it as among his finest things.
Morris photographed the world he wrote, and his pictures of scoured farm interiors are the book's visual twin. He died in 1998, his standing unchanged: essential, and still waiting for the readership the prizes kept promising him.