Spellbinders

Spellbinders by Margaret Culkin Banning

Spellbinders* by Margaret Culkin Banning is set in a midwestern American city and centers on a web of characters whose lives intersect through politics, marriage, ambition, and desire in the early years of women's suffrage. Helen Flandon is the beautiful, intellectually restless wife of Gage Flandon, a powerful Republican lawyer and political operative. Their marriage is passionate but increasingly strained by a fundamental conflict: Gage is deeply protective of Helen, resenting anything that draws her out of her domestic sphere, while Helen chafes under that protectiveness and longs to exercise her considerable intelligence and charm on a larger stage. The arrival of Helen's college friend Margaret Duffield, a self-possessed feminist organizer sent from the national Republican committee to mobilize women voters, sharpens this tension. Margaret is disciplined, cerebral, and emotionally self-contained, and her presence reawakens in Helen the ambitions and convictions she has let lie dormant through years of marriage and motherhood. Margaret works alongside Mrs. Brownley, a socially prominent older woman, to organize women across the district for the Republican Party. Their organizational work takes them into the surrounding countryside, where they encounter Adeline Thorstad, an energetically ambitious club woman and small-town politician, and her daughter Freda. Freda is a striking young woman of deep feeling and romantic temperament, less interested in organized feminism than in beauty, poetry, and experience. She accompanies her mother to the city and, through her mother's connections, ends up staying on as a guest in the Brownley household. Freda's time at the Brownleys' is uncomfortable. The elder Brownley daughter, Barbara, is hostile and maneuvering, particularly because Freda attracts the attention of Ted Smillie, a wealthy young man Barbara regards as her own. After an evening during which Ted behaves badly toward Freda and Barbara constructs a deliberately compromising scene, Freda walks out of the Brownley house in the middle of the night rather than submit to the humiliation of staying. Wandering the streets alone, she encounters Gregory Macmillan, an Irish Republican poet in the city on a lecture tour, who guides her to Margaret's apartment for shelter. Gregory has come partly in pursuit of Margaret, with whom he has been in love, but Margaret, armored by self-analysis and a kind of emotional coldness she herself acknowledges, cannot return his feeling. Freda, by contrast, meets Gregory with complete openness. They are drawn together by a shared romantic intensity and a refusal of small conventions, and within days they are secretly married in a neighboring town, spending a brief enchanted weekend at the Roadside Inn before Gregory must continue his lecture circuit. Freda returns to the city carrying the secret of her marriage, radiant with private happiness, and settles into work as a clerk in Gage Flandon's law office, a position Gage arranged partly out of genuine need and partly out of his instinctive desire to shelter her from what he sees as Margaret's influence. Meanwhile, Helen is nominated by the women of the state to serve as a delegate at large to the Republican National Convention, and accepts over Gage's strenuous objection. Gage's opposition is not simply reactionary: it springs from a deep, inarticulate need to keep the woman he loves untouched by the self-consciousness and public display he finds corrosive to genuine feeling. But he cannot explain himself without sounding possessive and retrograde, and Helen cannot honor his feeling without surrendering her own emerging sense of individual purpose. Their arguments circle without resolution, intimacy alternating with estrangement. Gage grows increasingly erratic, drinking more, performing badly at work, and nursing a brooding resentment that damages his professional standing with his senior partner, Sable. Gossip about Freda's weekend at the Roadside Inn reaches both Sable, who pressures Gage to dismiss her, and Helen, who in a moment of exhausted anger implies that she suspects Gage of involvement with the girl. The accusation, which is false, inflames Gage further, and a bitter confrontation follows in which years of unspoken grievance and mutual incomprehension finally break through the surface. The novel closes with all its central relationships under visible stress: Helen committed to her public role despite the cost to her marriage, Gage disintegrating under the weight of feelings he cannot express or resolve, Freda holding her secret happiness tightly against a world that misreads her, Margaret maintaining her composure while Walter Carpenter quietly presses his suit, and Gregory somewhere on the lecture circuit, writing letters full of urgency and poetry to the wife almost no one knows he has. The novel examines what women gain and lose as they move into public life, what men lose when the women they love change, and what both sexes sacrifice when feeling is subjected to ideology, whether the ideology of feminism or the ideology of domestic possession.

By Margaret Culkin Banning · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Domestic Drama, Social Commentary/Satire · 23 chapters · 96,397 words

First lines

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Gage Flandon put his wife's fur cloak around her and stood back, watching her as she took a final glance into the long mirror in the hall.

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Spellbinders is listed on Textopian as a novel by Margaret Culkin Banning, dated 1922 CE.

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fiction · novel · 20th century literature · American literature · drama · character study · relationships · social commentary · family dynamics · emotional depth · psychological · interpersonal conflict

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