Fair and Tender Ladies, like Lee Smith’s novel The Color Purple, is a literary work in the form of letters. The letters in question are written by the novel’s female protagonist, Ivy Rowe, and through them the reader gets an intimate account of her life. Like other letter novels, Smith creates the impression that the letters are written over time, as narrations of experiences shortly after they take place. Moreover, Smith persuades the readers to perceive that Ivy writes the letters in the middle of experience, or at least while she is in the middle of construing their meaning. Thus, readers feel that they are witnessing the changes that she undergoes apparent as they take place. Ivy begins writing letters at twelve, and her letters are an intimate depiction of her life up to her seventies. In most letter novels, both the letters a character writes and receives in response are portrayed, but in Smith’s novel, she only includes Ivy’s letters not the responses as well.
In her youth, Ivy dreams of becoming a professional writer but gives up that hope as a teenager after finding out that she is pregnant. Despite not becoming a professional writer, her powerful and profound letters prove that she is certainly a writer. Ivy appears to be conscious about what it means to be a writer and to write in a first-person, narrative format. For her, this creates a tension between being a writer and being a mother and woman, which Smith’s novel sharply portrays. By writing letters, Ivy is able to fulfill both her desire to become a writer and her maternal desires. However, Ivy’s desires to act and think independently continue to conflict with her desires to meet the needs of others. Yet, despite leading a dual life, Ivy is portrayed as resistant to the confines of a unilateral ideology. Thus, by making the narration seem like it is occurring progressively, Smith makes it possible for Ivy to shift her ideology over the period of time that her life and the novel progresses.
The feeling of witnessing the changes Ivy undergoes as they take place that Smith creates and maintains in her novel not only helps her portray the dual roles of Ivy as a writer and woman, but she also uses it to present Ivy as a complicated woman who does not want to lose herself while leading a conventional, domestic life. Smith’s female character in this novel desires to become a writer because she wants create an original life and she rejects stereotypical scripts of feminine behavior. It is arguable that by choosing motherhood over becoming a professional writer, Ivy was not denying her artistic desires, rather she just choose to share her writing with a limited audience instead of a broad one, had her work been published. Ivy creatively expresses herself in an intimate and private manner, as a result of which she gains a unique sense of self that undermines stereotypes. In other words, Ivy has been portrayed as being responsible for discovering herself.
It is also arguable that readers should not assume Ivy’s form of expression is limited because she writes about her life in the mountains. Many writers claim that writing about well-known material can be artistically liberating and that is what Ivy was doing. By having Ivy choose the private forum of letter writing, Smith portrays the fact to achieve self-identity, self-expression is necessary. The reader is continuously reminded that Ivy writes about her experiences while she is in the process of construing what they mean; therefore; Ivy’s act of writing is portrayed as a result of self-interpretation, rather as a necessary part of it. At the end of her life, Ivy burns the letters she wrote to her sister Silvaney and Ivy explains that it was the writing . . . that signified” (Smith, 1988, p. 314). Thus, it does not matter that Ivy’s writing did not become publically available, what matters is that she succeeded at searching for self through the personal and private act of writing.
It can also be argued suggested that Ivy’s letters serve as a mirror for herself, since she is able to “see” and construes her experiences when she writes these letters. Since the interpretation of these letters is continuous and progressive, they encourage Ivy to have a fluid identity, one that fluctuates and fragments, instead of having a fixed identity. Since Ivy is recording her thoughts while she progresses over a lengthy period of time, so the reader is able to accept and understand her ideological fluctuations. Similarly, Ivy’s expressed beliefs shift to and fro, quite cynically, rather than progressing in a straight direction. It is indeed arguable that the feeling of witnessing the changes Ivy undergoes as they take place allows for openness and possibilities to continue, a scenario that suits the experience of self-actualization. In fact, Smith refuses to conclude Ivy’s self-interpretation, so even Ivy’s life and the novel itself comes to an end apparently in the middle of her thoughts since she dies while writing what can be assumed as her last letter.
In conclusion, the fact that Ivy’s beliefs regarding numerous complicated cultural issues tend to fluctuate suggests that she favors treating truth as relative over the notion of “universal” truth. As mentioned throughout, Smith achieves this by making readers feel that they witnessing the changes that Ivy undergoes as they take place. Since it can be assumed that Ivy is continuously in the process of construing her experience as she writes about them in her letters, she does not reach any finite conclusions when it comes to understanding those experiences. In this case, the narrative requires the reader to become involved. Moreover, the fact that Ivy authentically portrays her experience and an individual female’s voice to resist “universal truths” reflects the fact that Smith succeeds in redefining the concept of an “artist.”
References
Smith, L. (1988). Fair and tender ladies. New York: Berkley Books.
