Miss Gordon's [early] stories rest on what were, at the time of their composition, relatively secure philosophical foundations, while her later works, including novels as well as short stories, are both structurally and texturally more complicated as a defense against those hostile armies which have appeared at the gates in ever-increasing numbers since the publication of The Forest of the South….
The philosophical assumptions to which I refer are ontological and define man's place in the natural order of being. They are assumptions which informed the South of Miss Gordon's early years and indeed, for society at large, remained unquestioned in Western civilization from preclassical times until the nineteenth century. They might be summarized as follows: God, a transcendent Being, exists and orders all things; man, a natural being, is in some measure an imperfect analogue of God; man's soul, therefore, partakes of the divine as well as of the earthly; for this reason, man occupies a "middle position" in the hierarchical structure of being, and his noblest achievements involve the affirmation of the god-like portion of his nature at the expense of the merely animal, an affirmation realized most often through sacrifice or self-control. (p. 54)
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