HAEJA K. CHUNG

Harriette Simpson Arnow best-known novel, The Dollmaker, has received
critical attention from a variety of perspectives -- feminist, Marxist, regionalist,
and humanist, to name a few. Regardless of their approach, however, most crit-
ical readers focus on how the Nevels family from Kentucky disintegrates in
industrialized Detroit during World War II, and particularly how Gertie, the cen-
tral character of the novel, survives the assaults of harsh reality in an alien cul-
ture. Critics invariably find her a redeeming character: Gertie is hailed as
"Arnow's most commanding character . . . the archetypal pioneer woman"
( Hobbs 119); in a TV movie of the novel, Gertie is celebrated as "the most
remarkable woman in American literature" whose "journey into selfhood is the
one many women and men will understand" (Fonda); Gertie makes a painful
"journey to awareness," but "the courage, endurance, and love which she illus-
trates can make possible the transcendence of suffering" ( Lee 98). Her departure
from Kentucky "constitutes a triumph" because "Gertie redefines her strength
and becomes the architect of a world that seems harsher than Kentucky's"
( Edwards 226). It is not surprising, then, that the novel featuring this "heroic"
woman ( Rigney 81; Malpezzi 84: Edwards 235) should be required reading for
the feminist intellectual ( Dixler 82).

Kathleen Walsh is perhaps the only critic to date who has extensively explored
Gertie's compulsions and how they contribute to her suffering. She writes,
"Readers who stress Gertie's helplessness adopt the character's own limited view
of her situation and fail to appreciate Arnow's complex treatment of an absorb-
ing and sympathetic character immobilized by self-doubt" (92). Arnow is more

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