ogy of male supremacy had gained hegemony. The scorched-earth
gesture of Evelina had left the next generation of women writers on
"barren ground," the title of one of Glasgow's major works. This
study approaches the fiction of these three writers from the thesis
that their writings centrally concern the exodus of women from their
mothers,' gardens and their "fall" into the world of the fathers, the
capitalist patriarchy of early twentieth-century America.

On January 8, 1840, Sarah Edgarton wrote to Luella J. B. Case, a
woman with whom she was intimately and romantically involved, "I
would be one of Diana's maids of honor." ¹ Diana/Artemis, the
Roman-Greek goddess of the woods, protector of wildlife and the
young, was unmarried, uninterested in men, and accompanied by a
coterie of female companions. ² She symbolizes a dominant and ideal-
ized life-style among nineteenth-century women. In the women's lit-
erature of the period the Diana figure is recurrent: she prefers the
company of women, rejects men, is often at home in nature and
solitude, and chooses independence, or a career, over marriage. In-
deed, in numerous works the intrusion of men into the Dianic bower
is seen as poisonous. ³

The treatment of the Diana theme by Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow
illustrates how, by their time, attitudes had changed. In The Age of
Innocence ( 1920) Wharton presents the Diana figure (May Welland)
negatively as a victim of a forced and stultifying ignorance. "The realm
of Diana" was for Wharton"chaste and rule-bound," the traditional
sphere to which women had historically been restricted. Moreover,
Wharton saw the Dianic realm as existing apart from the world of art,
which was a male sphere, she felt, to which women were still denied
entrance. ⁴ Cather and Glasgow also present important Diana-Demeter
figures, Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! ( 1912) and Dorinda Oakley
in Barren Ground ( 1925), but, while more positive than Wharton's, they
nevertheless operate in isolation, without a consoling female commu-
nity, and in a world that is alien and fallen.

Although the transition from the myth of an Edenic/Dianic women's
community to that of a lapsarian, male-dominated world may be seen in
a number of late nineteenth-century women's writings, it is most appar-
ent in the works of New England local colorist Mary E. Wilkins Free-
man. ⁵ " Evelina's Garden," for example, embodies the transition in two
characters, who are cousins, each named Evelina. The older Evelina is a
Diana-Demeter figure. She lives alone, rejects men (having herself ex-
perienced a brief, failed romantic encounter), and devotes herself to

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