SCARBOROUGH, Dorothy

Born 27 January 1878, Mount Carmel, Texas; died 7 November 1935, New York, New York

Daughter of John B. and Mary Ellison Scarborough

Dorothy Scarborough came from a prosperous Southern background—both grandfathers owned large plantations, and her father was a lawyer and judge. Scarborough received her B.A. (1896) and M.A. (1898) from Baylor University, where she taught from 1905 to 1914. She did advanced graduate work at the University of Chicago, Oxford University, and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1917). She joined the faculty of Columbia, specializing in teaching short story writing.

Scarborough's doctoral dissertation, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), is an important scholarly work. She establishes the Gothic romance and French, Italian, German, and Russian works as primary influences on the use of the supernatural in modern literature. She discusses the supernatural by categories: modern ghosts, the devil, folktales, and supernatural science. Scarborough concludes that the war was the cause for the contemporary interest in the supernatural and that American writers are essentially responsible for combining humor and the supernatural.

Scarborough contributed book reviews, sometimes covering more than twenty works in a single review, to publications such as the New York Sun, Bookman, and the Dial. She attacks writers who use fiction as a vehicle for propaganda or didacticism. Unfortunately, as many reviewers have noted, this criticism is applicable to her own novels and short stories. Scarborough is praised for her realistic presentation, but condemned for her editorializing.

Many of Scarborough's novels use the Texas farmlands as setting. The plots revolve around romance, but love is frequently hampered by the problems facing the tenant farmer, the economics of the cotton industry, the threat of drought, flood, and the boll weevil. The depiction of natural forces in The Wind (1925) has been compared with that of Conrad (Times Literary Supplement, 5 Nov. 1925); the 1928 film, starring Lillian Gish, was, however, criticized for excessive use of nature imagery.

Impatient Griselda (1927) is one novel not flawed by propagandizing. Again the setting is a small Texas town with its typical inhabitants: the minister and his wife and children, the doctor, the do-gooder, the busybody, and the Negro cook. Scarborough contrasts two types of women: the seductress (Lilith) and the wife (Irene). The novel opens with the death of one Lilith as she gives birth to a second. Irene marries Lilith's widower (Guinn the minister) and raises the stepdaughter Lilith and her own four children, but feels she never replaces either Lilith in her husband's heart. The book closes with the death of the second Lilith as she gives birth to a third-generation Lilith. Irene sees the cycle continuing as her own daughter must stand in for another Lilith. The types remain unreconciled.

Scarborough did important research in collecting folk songs and ballads; her interest dated back to her early teaching career in Texas. In On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925) and A Song Catcher in Southern Mountains (sponsored by "Project 41" at Columbia University and published posthumously in 1937), Scarborough discusses origins, influences, instruments, and variations and provides melodies for many songs. (Ola Lee Gulledge collected and transcribed the music in the first book.) On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs includes a chapter on the blues based primarily on a visit with W. C. Handy. Scarborough uses these songs extensively in her novels and the autobiographical From a Southern Porch (1919).

Humor pervades Scarborough's writings; she employs informal language, coins words, and puns. A modern reader may be annoyed by Scarborough's facile stereotyping of races (she shows blacks as a happy people singing while they toil in field or kitchen) or amused by her genteel treatment of passion and illegitimate birth, but her novels are entertaining. A scholar may be frustrated by the lack of scholarly apparatus in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, but Scarborough has made significant contributions to scholarship with her dissertation and folk-song collecting.

Other Works:

Fugitive Verses (1912). Famous Modern Ghost Stories (edited by Scarborough, 1921). Humorous Ghost Stories (edited by Scarborough, 1921). In the Land of Cotton (1923). Can't Get a Red Bird (1929). The Stretch-Berry Smile (1932). The Story of Cotton (1933). Selected Short Stories of Today (edited by Scarborough, 1935).

Bibliography:

Overton, G. The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928).

Reference works:

DAB . TCA (1942).

Other references:

Bookman (Jan. 1920). PW (16 Nov. 1935). NYT (8 Nov. 1935). NYTBR (11 Nov. 1917, 14 Aug. 1927, 27 Oct. 1929, 14 Feb. 1932, 11 April 1937). TLS (15 Nov. 1917, 5 Nov. 1925, 20 Nov. 1937).

—NANCY G. ANDERSON