Usually categorized as naturalistic fiction, Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker (1954) may be considered more fruitfully within the context of heightened realism. Beneath the deceptively simple surface of its narrative lies a selectivity and shaping that transcends the reportorial naturalistic method. The journey which the novel describes of Gertie Nevels and her family from the Kentucky mountains to Detroit is an archetypal one: from pastoral to urban setting and specifically a literal and metaphorical descent from an almost Edenic environment to the city of Hell. Both physical milieux and the characters' psychological responses re-enforce the perception. To consider Gertie's experience in such terms is to broaden our awareness of the work's riches, for we must evaluate the nature of the urban world's torture, determine what innocence is lost, and decide whether or not a figurative exit from the society of the damned is possible.

The novel's two-part development, its movement...