Dorothy Allison--Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)

Though I doubt I’ll be as thorough as my previous posts have been, I’ve decided to return to this blog periodically as I continue reading through my dissertation.  As satisfying as finishing my reading for exams was, after I passed them I made a list of even more titles that I hadn’t included on my exam lists that I had since realized were going to be important.  I’m writing as I’m reading—so far, I’ve sent two chapters to my chair, and have notes on two more chapters.  These two in progress, however, are two chapters that I think will require a lot more reading.

I just finished Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, a short collection of reflections on her family and how they informed her understanding of the world.  Chapter Three of my dissertation, on how ugliness can represent history marked on the body, is the one in which I expect to use Allison the most.  I’m also re-reading her to prepare for my trip to Durham this summer, where I’ve won a fellowship to do research in the archive of her papers there.  Two or Three Things, despite its brevity, is pretty key to my understanding of ugliness.  In it, Allison makes explicit the connection between ugliness and class status—even women in her family who begin beautiful are eventually worn down and made ugly by life.

After she moves away, Allison reaches a new understanding of beauty and ugliness through her own romantic relationships: “Beauty is a hard thing.  Beauty is a mean story.  Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems.  Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.  And I loved her for that.

“We were not beautiful.  We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it.  The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly.  Almost always ugly” (37).

I, too, am grateful for her girlfriend’s observation that beauty requires leisure.  If ugliness is history marked on the body—if bodies worn down become ugly, does beauty, too, record events?  Or does it signify an uneventful life?  Lack of wrinkles meaning lack of worry, but also lack of laughing, concentration, even exposure to the sun?  Beauty being fragile (slender girls who die young), protected (imprisoned?), who are objects of admiration rather than subjects of their own stories?

Anne Goodwyn Jones--Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (1981)

Jones looks at the work of seven white women writing before WWII who “all criticize the ideal of southern womanhood point by point in similar ways, and by means of similar imagery, plotting, characterization, and narrative points of view.”  Importantly, she observes that

the ideal of southern womanhood that informed these women’s lives and fictions not only often conflicted with their actual human needs but also contained its own internal ambiguities and contradictions.  When the image exhorts both intelligence and submission, both bravery and fragility, conflict seems inevitable. (xii)

As Jones observes “that ideal did not serve only as a norm for individual behavior[,] it became also a central symbol in the South’s idea of itself” (xii), she provides an important reason for the study of women in this literature: “in the American South woman represented as well [man’s] ambivalent feelings about social class, race, and national identity” (5).  Further, she points out that for traditional southern womanhood, itself more a personification than a human possibility, “efforts to join person and personification, to make self into symbol, must fail because the idea of southern womanhood specifically denies the self” (4).  While acknowledging the similarities between traditional southern womanhood and the Victorian lady or American True Womanhood, she points out important differences:

the southern lady is at the core of a region’s self-definition; the identity of the South is contingent in part upon the persistence of its tradition of the lady.  Secondly, and perhaps for that reason, the ideal of southern womanhood seems to have lasted longer than other ideas….in a third divergence…southern womanhood has from the beginning been inextricably linked to racial attitudes….finally, the very image itself seems, if not radically different from, at least an extreme version of the nineteenth century lady….And the class—aristocratic—that the image of the lady represents receives a stronger emphasis in the South than elsewhere. (4-5)

Significant to my work is her quote from Robert Afton Holland, a clergyman at the University o the South, who in 1909 said that, “once outside the home, woman become a horrific animal, acquiring ‘bigger hands, bigger feet, higher cheek bones, lanker limbs, flatter chests, hook noses, lips thin and tight” (20).

While the individual chapters have analyses and observations on specific authors, works, and characters which I find useful, Jones’s remarks in her conclusion are the most useful for my project.  For example, she observes that,

In contrast to symbolizing beauty as purity and fragility, as the southern lady should, these protagonists have dark eyebrows and strong bodies.  Probably because their values—free intelligence, aloneness, self-assertion—are traditionally masculine, the physical appearance of the protagonists is often atypical, even androgynous.  Edna, Scarlett, Katharine, Beulah, Hagar, and Gabriella are all described as striking but not beautiful: they have “character.”  On the other hand, to Oliver, Virginia appeared fragile and delicate, her skin like magnolia blossoms.  Moreover, many characters feel and express their sexuality, from the adolescent Claire’s emerging sensuousness, responding to the dancing in the streets, to Calixta’s full adult pleasure in the act of sex. (354)

Further, she points out that “traditional images of beauty of the southern female are, in almost every work, scorned or ignored.  Beginning by discarding the fragility of the skin like magnolias and eyes like violets, these women writers are inventing through imagery their own definitions of southern womanhood” (362).  In Jones’s consideration, the heart of the conflicts expressed in these works is a fundamental tension between realism and romanticism.  Romanticism, a familiar mode, allows the author to “substitute for material reality a dream that is, paradoxically, more ‘realistic’ than objective reality.  This is, in fact, what these writers do when they dream up characters who are neither beautiful nor fragile, conventionally good nor powerless” (359).  While these authors grew up with romanticism as the primary mode of their society, “because the realist depicts the actual daily experience of ordinary persons, realism would have appealed as the literary method for debunking the ideal of the southern lady.  It would thus serve as a corrective for the entire society of the South, in exposing the romantic illusion of the marble lady” (359).  Realism “reveals the ugliness, the injustice, and the sordidness of society, which romanticism can pass over” (358).

It occurs to me that Jones’s observations circle around Sonnet 130—that the physical appearance of Shakespeare’s mistress is what attracts the speaker—it makes her corporeal, rather than ethereal.  It may be in part that we want characters we can relate to.  It may be that flaws make someone more attractive, more interesting—in the whole “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” Tolstoy way.

Tennessee Williams--A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, Streetcar follows Stanley, Stella, and Blanche in Stanley and Stella’s apartment in New Orleans.  Its New Orleans setting is a heavy influence on the story, for its jazz and its sense of decayed beauty, a place where Stella’s sister Blanche has to take a “street-care named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields” (I.1).  Blanche is described as having a “delicate beauty [which] must avoid a strong light.  There is something about her unusual manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth” (I.1).  Blanche, like New Orleans, is a decaying beauty, and it is her fraying beauty which gives away her own immorality.  Stanley, her foil, is of an animalistic masculinity: “Since early manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women…with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens” (I.1).  (Notice how his masculinity is defined as sexual and in contrast to hens.)  Interestingly, Blanche’s difficulties are traced to her marriage to a “beautiful and talented man [who] was a degenerate” (I.7)—as with many Williams’ plays, the taint of homosexual masculinity is present and degenerative.

Edith Wharton--The House of Mirth (1905)

Considered by most to be Wharton’s first significant work of fiction, House of Mirth was an immediate best-seller, selling out its first printing of 40,000 and its second printing of 20,000 in two weeks.  By the end of 1905, it had sold 140,000 copies.  It was the most successful book that Scribner’s had published to date.  The title comes from Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The house of the wise is in the house of mourning/ The house of the fool is in the house of mirth.”  The novel follows the tragic heroine Lily Bart, dangerously single at 29, as she struggles to survive aristocratic New York society with dwindling funds and dwindling future possibilities.  Over the course of the novel, her prospects decline from house parties at which she is still welcome as long as she helps out her hostess with various duties, to being a sort of hired guide by the nouveau riche who need help navigating the unfamiliar waters of aristocratic society, to finally near-destitution as she works unsuccessfully in a millinery shop.  After using the last of her funds to pay off her debts, she dies of a suspicious overdose of sleeping drops. 

The novel is an accusatory examination of what Wai-Chi Dimock has characterized as the marketplace logic at the heart of the novel.  As Lily explains,

You think we live on the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense—but it’s a privilege we have to pay for!   We eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars—yes, but there’s a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries….the girl pays it by tips and cards…and by going to the best dress-makers, and having just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself fresh and exquisite and amusing!” (279-80)

Lily’s problem is that she cannot ever completely give herself over to the kind of mercenary self-commodification required for financial success in this society.  Every time she is on the verge of marital success—for example, when Percy Gryce is in love with her enough to only require her to attend a church service with him and his mother, Lily instead goes for a walk with her friend Selden.

Selden is perhaps the most infuriating character in the book, in his love for Lily never completely translates in his marrying her. Rather, in the frequent visions of Lily presented from his point of view, he fails to see her as either completely human or as innocent of artifice as she at times genuinely can be.  Indeed, from the opening scene forward, Lily is presented as a commodity to be appraised and exchanged.  Selden thinks to himself that “she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her” (5).  Lily, brought up by a mother who instills above all an absolute fear of anything resembling what she characterizes as “dinginess” and a father who dies after losing his fortune, is poorly prepared for adult responsibility.  A exemplar of Naturalism, leaving Lily vulnerable to cruel and heartless society, Wharton places her tragic heroine, Lily Bart, in a society that she describes as a "hot-house of traditions and conventions.”

Carson McCullers--The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

            This beautifully moving novel was McCullers’ first.  It takes place in a mill town in Georgia in the 1930s, and primarily follows the character of John Singer, a deaf mute man, and the people who are drawn to him.  This group—Mick Kelley, a very poor young girl whose head is filled with music; Dr. Copeland, an African-American doctor slowly dying of tuberculosis, whose idealism has alienated him from his community; Jake Blount, a drunk carnival worker, who tries to preach a message of Marxism; and Biff Brannon, a widowed café owner.  Singer’s muteness enables this group of outcasts to confide in him, filling in his character in whatever capacity best suits them.  Mick, who suffers from hunger and poverty, both confides her secret fears and dreams in him, as well as relying on his radio to bring her the classical music with which she is consumed.  Dr. Copeland, who gave his children names like Portia and Karl Marx, works tirelessly ministering to people with lungs weak from mill work who can’t afford to pay him; Singer is the first (and only) white man who has ever treated him simply as another person, not another black person.  Jake recovers from a nasty drunk in Singer’s room, and continues to confide his class-based frustrations to him.  And Brannon, especially once his wife dies, finds Singer’s room to be a place of comfort.

            Though all of these characters consider Singer to be their closest friend, the only person with whom Singer similarly pursues a friendship is his former roommate Antonapoulos, a deaf-mute man who falls ill and is eventually institutionalized after his illness changes him, leaving him mentally unstable.  Singer spends his life devoted to his friend, regularly spending his vacation travelling to see the Greek (as he is often referred to) at the hospital, despite Antonapoulos’s apparent disregard for his friendship.  Singer signs and signs to Antonapoulos, without ever receiving a reciprocal acknowledgment.  At the end of the novel, Singer travels to the hospital only to discover that Antonapoulos is dead.  Encountering three other bowler-hatted deaf-mute men in a bar near the hospital, Singer tries to join them, but is politely excluded from their conversation. After this encounter, Singer returns home and kills himself.

            As the novel takes place in the 1930s in a small southern mill town, poverty is a disturbing fact of life.  McCullers gives unromanticized details about the extent of poverty, noting not only the lengths to which the poor must go in order to eat anything, but also presents rather straightforward information about what poverty like that faced by the Kellys looks like:

Money was the main thing.  All the time it was money, money, money.  They had to pay through the nose for Baby Wilson’s private room and private nurse.  But even that was just one bill.  By the time one thing was paid for something else always would crop up.  They owed around two hundred dollars that had to be paid right away.  They lost the house.  Their Dad got a hundred dollars out of the deal and let the bank take over the mortgage.  Then he borrowed another fifty dollars and Mister Singer went on the note with him.  Afterward they had to worry about rent every month instead of taxes….Bill had a job in a bottling plant and made ten dollars a week.  Hazel worked as a helper in a beauty parlor for eight dollars a week. Etta sold tickets at a movie for five dollars” (238).

From there, she explains who pays for what, and how even lunch has become a luxury, and how “sometimes she and George were downright hungry for two or three days” (239).  By the novel’s end, Mick has left school and taken a job at Woolworth’s, a step which she realizes even as she’s making it is closing off any other future possibilities, that she is being “trapped by something….Once they were used to the money coming in it would be impossible to do without again.  That was the way things were” (318).

While Jake identifies the root of the area’s economic problems on capitalism in general, he also sees this poverty as a particularly regional one: “At least one third of all Southerners live and die no better than the lowest peasant in any European Fascist state….Who owns the South?  Corporations in the North own three fourths of all the South….For under this system pigs are valuable and men are not” (298).  It is in this way that the theme of poverty is tied to larger themes of regionalism and racism in the novel, as demonstrated by a conversation between Jake and Dr. Copeland.  In response to Jake’s monologue about the inherent inequalities of capitalism, Dr. Copeland responds, “you are giving no attention to the very separate question of the Negro….it is impossible to see the full situation without including us Negroes” (298).  Jake continues to talk about Fascism, to which Dr. Copeland replies, “So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been” (299).  In fact, the rise of European Fascism allows for several characters to make comparisons between Fascist anti-semitism and American racism.  Once again, Dr. Copeland: “The history of my people will be commensurate with the interminable history of the Jew—only bloodier and more violent” (299).  Throughout most of his life, Dr. Copeland has believed in an ideology of uplift.  As his friend Marshall Nichols explains, “it behooves us to strive with care and not endanger this amicable relationship already established.  Then by gradual means a better condition will come about” (293).  After his son loses his legs because of mistreatment in prison, and he himself is beaten and jailed after trying to find justice for his son at the courthouse, however, Dr. Copeland begins to question his methodology.  Unfortunately, by the time he makes this realization, his health is so deteriorated that he leaves the town to be taken care of by his extended family in the country.  He leaves Jake with a message of solidarity, that social change will only come from working with others—and it is such solidarity which Jake seeks at the novel’s end, solidarity through the type of community which Jake is sure is unique to the South.

And finally, in terms of my own research, there are some interesting points about ugliness and beauty in women (or, more specifically, girls).  For most of the novel, Mick is described as a tomboy, wearing boy’s shorts and with hair in constant cowlicks.  Occasionally—such as for her prom party—she dresses up in her sisters’ clothes and wears make-up, but in these scenes she often appears almost as in drag.  The sexual awakening she experiences with Harry, however, marks something of a turning point in her appearance, as shortly after this scene—in which Harry haltingly admits, “Listen here.  I think you’re so pretty, Mick.  I never did think so before.  I don’t mean I thought you were very ugly—I just mean that—“ (273)—Mick takes on the adult responsibilities of a job at Wooltworth’s, to which she starts wearing stockings and jewelry, more properly inhabiting the costume of a woman.  After her physical intimacy with Harry, Mick is sure that the changes she has undergone can be read from her face; she is sure that her sexuality must be marked on her body.  However, her mother’s response to her physical appearance in this scene is only to tell her to “Quit frowning like that, Mick.  You’re coming to the age where you ought to fix up and try to look your best you can” (278). 

Even more intriguing are the changes which happen to Baby, Biff’s niece and child performer, whose beauty is destroyed in a freak gun accident.  Her (former stage) mother Lucile confides to Biff that,

If a child is kept clean and well cared for and pretty then that child will usually be sweet and smart.  But if a child is dirty and ugly then you can’t expect anything much.  What I’m trying to get at is that Baby is so shamed over losing her hair and that bandage on her head that it just seems like it makes her cut the buck all the time.  She won’t practice her elocution—she won’t do a thing.  She feels so bad I just can’t manage her (231)

Once again, there is a connection between inner and outer virtue, and in this configuration it’s not a person’s moral character which shines through to her outer appearance, but rather the outer appearance which influences the inner character.  The surface is understood to be a marker of the inside—to Mick, who assumes that an inner change must be marked on the outside, or to Lucile, who thinks that changes to physical appearance affect the character inside.  It would be interesting to compare the behavior of Baby to that of Dorothy Allison’s Shannon Pearl, whose physical disfigurement seems to have given her a horrid character.