His Family by Ernest Poole

Aging widower with three daughters contends with modern womanhood

Trivia question: What was the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction? That would be His Family by Ernest Poole, published in 1917. The Chicago-born Poole was better known back in the golden age of muckraking fiction. These days his name is unlikely to ring a bell with anyone but professors of American literature. Poole’s novel His Family, however, is worth more than just the answer to a trivia question. It is a fine work of realism from the World War I era. I had previously read Poole’s novel The Harbor, which was good, but I liked His Family even better.

Roger Gale grew up on a farm in New Hampshire and came to become a successful businessman in New York City. As the novel opens around 1913, he is a widower with three adult daughters. Although one of his daughters is married, all three still depend on him a great deal for emotional and financial support. In his wife’s absence, Roger is resolved to be actively involved in his daughters’ lives and see to their happiness. His daughters are modern women in a modern world, which can be a source of frustration for Roger, whose ideas of feminine gender roles were formed in an earlier era. When the outbreak of the Great War in Europe causes economic troubles in America, this well-to-do upper middle class family faces hard times.

The Gale daughters embody three archetypal women’s roles of a century ago: the devoted mother, the working woman, and the socialite. The eldest daughter, Edith, is a housewife and mother of a handful of children. She is such a dutiful mother that the welfare of her children is all that matters to her, to the degree that she really has no life outside of their care. Deborah is a schoolteacher turned principal turned superintendent of “tenement schools”—i.e. inner-city schools that serve mostly poor immigrant children. A feminist, suffragist, and social reformer, Deborah looks at the 3,000 students under her charge as if they were her own family and drives herself hard in working for their betterment. This prevents her from allowing herself to start a family of her own. Laura, the youngest sister, is a rather flighty party girl who just wants to dress nice and have fun. She takes nothing seriously, including the idea of family, and has resolved not to have children, much to her father’s chagrin. These three sisters are some of the more complexly drawn female characters I’ve encountered in fiction of this era. Though times have changed much in the past century, the Gale daughters still read as real women, not caricatures or stereotypes.

His Family is a thoughtfully written work of realism. It’s not what you could call exciting, because nothing is exaggerated for dramatic effect. One does, however, become very involved in the lives of this family, and the reader comes to anticipate each successive chapter. Unlike a feature film that builds to a powerful climax, the story here is more like an episodic television series. A problem arises, and the family deals with it; then another problem arises, and the family faces that. It’s much like life itself in that regard. Poole is faithful to the naturalist school of literature in showing us the heroic dramas of everyday life without romantic embellishment. Of course, some aspects of life were a bigger deal in 1917 than they are now, like a case of the flu or a divorce. While conveying the gravity of such events, Poole handles them with a ring of truth that still holds up to this day. Perhaps some of the family’s problems are resolved a bit too conveniently, whereas an author of a few decades later might have written with more pessimism.

While The Harbor left me with mixed feelings about Poole’s literary talents, His Family has convinced me that he was one of the better unsung realist writers in early 20th-century America, worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence with Theodore Dreiser or Frank Norris. After reading this fine novel, I’d definitely like to read more of Poole’s work.