The Dark Dawn
by . New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1926. 12mo. ix+294 pp. $2.00.
Two aspects of Martha Ostenso’s powers — strengthened and more dearly defined in this second novel — set her apart from the greater number of her younger contemporaries. Rarely in a day when loose construction seems so much the rule among novels does one hit upon a tale which displays the directness of purpose, the nice balancing of dramatic intensity with lighter fanciful relief, the careful building toward climax, of The Dark Dawn. Add to this an appreciation of dramatic values and there is reason enough for praising Miss Ostenso as a craftsman of ability. But to halt the definition there would be to tell only half the story. She is more than a craftsman; she is one of the few authentic creators of genre pictures in America.
Once more her scene is laid in the Middle West, where rolling prairies serve as sombre background for men and women whose lives take their tempo from a primary struggle with nature. It is a story of conflict — a hopeless sort of conflict which Lucian Dorrit wages with the strong, dominating Hattie Murker, who has taken him deliberately to spite a former lover. His struggle to be master in his own house goes behind his wedding day — to almost prophetic memories of the great William Dorrit’s domination by Lucian’s mother. With a growing sense of fatality, he regards his own marriage as a struggle, doggedly driving himself through his wife’s triumphs to the final test of strength for which he must conserve all his forces. When it is over, his comment to old Dr. Muller sounds the emptiness of victory: ‘Perhaps I’ll be in Hell for the rest of my life, but I’ll be there free. And that’s what I wanted, is n’t it?’
Miss Ostenso knows how to fashion a character as well as she understands the construction of a novel. Her success appears to grow out of the fact that she is no mere observer, hanging over the fences and wondering, curiously, how the men in the fields can endure their plodding fate; nor is she a visitor in the kitchens of their wives, pondering the narrowness of their circumscribed existence. Rather, she is one of them; she has grasped their point of view and, instead of the conventional, anæmic study of repressed lives transplanted from their proper urban background, she has contrived a story which is redolent of the soil.
More, it is dramatic, but in this latter quality lies one of the dangers of Miss Ostenso’s method. Building toward climax, she gradually heightens her action until it approaches sheer melodrama. The characters assume a frantic attitude toward their situation which seems theatrical, unreal. It is unfortunate that such a fine novel should be marred by over-stressing, but it seems quite safe to predict that the author, having mastered form so well, will learn, as she matures, the quality of restraint which she seems now to lack.
STEWART BEACH