SOURCE: “Plains Song: Wright Morris's New Melody for Audacious Female Voices,” in Great Plains Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 29-37.

In the following essay, Lewis discusses Morris's treatment of women and feminism in his last novel.

Triumph by Default

“Man's culture was a hoax. Was there a woman who didn't feel it? Perhaps a decade, no more, was available to women to save themselves, as well as the planet. Women's previous triumphs had been by default. Men had simply walked away from the scene of the struggle, leaving them with the children, the chores, the culture, and a high incidence of madness.” The lines are from Wright Morris's Plains Song: for Female Voices; they represent a “brief resume” of the “forthcoming lecture” by Alexandra Selkirk, a feminist who has just arrived in Grand Island, Nebraska, to rally the daughters of the Plains to their incipient liberation.¹ Although the...