Wright Morris Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert E. Knoll

Critical Essay by Robert E. Knoll

[Plains Song for Female Voices] is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to fiction. Funny and moving, realistic and visionary, symbolic and factual, it shows the hand of the practiced master.

Readers get two views of reality in Morris's novels. On the one hand they get a transcription of appearance, an almost naturalistic fidelity to physical detail…. On the other hand readers of Morris are repeatedly caught up in a vision which transmogrifies ordinary life….

In this most recent novel, Plains Song for Female Voices, the ordinary and the extraordinary are almost perfectly synchronized. The persons and the places are presented with notable fidelity to appearance, but at the same time they stand generally for more than themselves. (p. 82)

In [Cora's and Emerson's] hard life of planting and transplanting, they avert their eyes from one another, never really talking, never coming to an expressed understanding…. As seen by later...
(read more)