Michael Kreyling--Inventing Southern Literature (1998)

Despite the fact that I'm knee-deep in exam-writing (and full of hurricane anxiety), I'm still reading to finish up my lists.  This book in particular is coming in quite handy.  However, because I'm focusing on exam writing, this summary is not up to my usual standards of summaries--I just wanted primarily to get the significant quotes recorded.

Right now, I'm at 28 days before the essays are due!

Kreyling’s book is “a consideration of the ways and means by which southernness has come into being and been sustained there, along with the attempt to measure how and why the meaning of the term has changed over time” (169).  He relies upon Benedict Anderson’s concepts of nationhood in order to explain how the South understands itself.  Unlike Patricia Yaeger’s later work, in this work he says that this text is “not a counternarrative that seeks to dynamite the rails on which the official narrative runs; rather, it is a metanarrative, touching upon crucial moments when and where the official narrative is made or problematically directed” (ix). 

In his discussion of the Agrarians and the formation of the southern canon and southern studies which put Quentin Compson and Faulkner at the center, he notes that putting Quentin at the center is the result of “the legion of white males who have assumed responsibility for inventing a style for thinking of the South.”  I’m particularly interested in his discussion of feminist responses:

Feminist critics are not unanimous on an alternative to the Quentin thesis.  Some, like Carol S. Manning, might he called moderates: Manning points  out the defects in the Quentin position but wants to preserve the status quo  long enough to modify it for the admission of southern women's fiction (Manning   i-i2). A little to the left are critics like Susan V. Donaldson and Anne  Goodwyn Jones, who would like to modify the meaning of "history" in the  prevailing southern formula (usually along lines of Foucaultien "genealogy")  and, thus, run southern women's history into the mainstream at an angle”  (Donaldson i77ff). 

He goes on:

More extreme is the position of southern lesbian critic Mal, Segrest, who  would have community admit neither men nor their history: "For there have  always been Southern women who knew that they did not want to join the  white men in Mississippi for anything; who have known that WE did not  lose the war" (Segrest 29-3o; emphasis in original). Segrest's view represents  the most radical denial of the Quentin thesis, and it is not merely a matter  of polemic. Her reading of the figure of the spinster (like Jones's reading of  the southern-woman-as-author, but more radically) breaks the hold of the  consensus in thematic literary readings: "The other terrible absence in male-dominated   fictions is the absence of female community, or even its possibility. In all the stories I described [Ahsalom, Absalom!, "A Rose for Emily,"  "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," and "Good Country People"[, the spinster was  ;clone, set apart from both amen and married women. The small-town communities   within the fictions showed complete lack of support for female self-identification.   Without either respect for female solitude or the presence of  female community', of course spinsters were seen as freaks (Segrest 35).

Segrest's critique fractures the ideal of community by alleging that representations   of it have been unreflectingly male As I have argued just above,  Simpson's reading of Roberts could fall under this indictment. If Segrest's  image of community is as narrow from the feminist side as any might he from  the male, it is nevertheless provocative. In her "fable" of becoming it southern   writer, exclusion from "the community" is double. She dates her initiation   to the moment when she spied, from it distance, the black children who  were integrating her school in the Alabama of George Wallace: "I have it  tremendous flash of empathy, of identification, with their vulnerability and  their aloneness inside that circle of force Ithe white males of the Alabama  Highway I'atroll. Their separation is mine" (Segrest, 20). Segrest, establishing   another ideological center, uses the vocabulary of the former center-race   and community identification-to make herself it southern (woman)  writer. Extending and "outing" Lillian Smith's deconstruction of the southern   imaginary, Segrest links southern women writers in shared consciousness  of exclusion from it constructed center.

What the Quentin-based canon formation leads to is blindness to the kinds of female community which exist in the work of southern women writers, and the kinds of women who are estranged from these communities.  I particularly like Kreyling’s observation that while Flannery O’Connor’s comment on the centrality of Faulkner to southern studies originally referred to him as the “Dixie Limited,” her comment was quickly changed to be understood as the “Dixie Special.” 

If one looks at the work of southern women’s writing, one sees different kinds of commentaries on not only community, but the work of race within these communities:

Eli:abeth Jane Harrison reads the "other" narrative as a version of the  more familiar pastoral. Her reading of recent fiction by southern women,

black and white, arrives at it kind of utopian community: "Despite difficulties   in overcoming the harriers to sex and race equality, female friendship  and cooperative communities become an important part of the new southern   garden for these women authors" (Harrison i4-15). Harrison's guide is  Nina Auerhach's Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (tg78), it work  that is both about utopian communities of women in fiction and the product  of the author's own personal experience of "a model community of women  Ithe Radcliff Institute and its Fellows] who gave a local habitation to the  Utopias I read about" ("Acknowledgments," n.p.). Female textual utopias  exist, for Auerbach, in it ghostly relationship with the male, public community   of history: "The communities of women which have haunted our literary   imagination from the beginning are emblems of female self-sufficiency  which create their own corporate reality, evoking both wishes and fears" (5).  These wishes and fears are sexual, political, social, and historical; they are  "voiced" in a "code" that, unlike the male code, is "a whispered and it fleeting   thing, more it buried language than a rallying cry" (y). For it lesbian  critic like Segrest, burial is deep and the code sexually complex. For critics  like Donaldson, Manning, and Jones the "silenced" voices are still audible in  the Quentinian din.

As Segrest suggests in her memory of identifying with the black children  who integrated her school, experiences of racial exclusion may serve as metaphors   of sexual exclusion. The historical trajectory of African-American  women's writing, from the slave narratives of the nineteenth century to their  "recovery" by Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, suggests a common  cause. The household, sexual politics of slavery produced in the community  of women, across racial boundaries, a lively code, open to many and sometimes   contradictory meanings. As Harriet Beecher Stowe would have it in  Uncle Tom's Cabin, black and white women-though unequal- conununi-  cated in the channel of domestic management and sentiment. Chloe and  her mistress bond against Mr. Shelby's purely economic decision to sell Tom  and Eli:a and her son. Eli:a Harris and Mrs. Bird openly conspire to circumvent   the public code-the Fugitive Slave Law thematically presented as a  male language. In texts by African-American women who were slaves, Harriet   Jacobs being the most prominent example, conversation within sexual  territory but across the racial barrier is more subtle. Sometimes, in Jacobs'.  narrative, the lines hold, and sometimes they Freak down.

Solid or breakable, conversation in overlapping racial and sexual channels  is vital to an understanding of the African-American woman's image of community as well as to the white southern woman's imagined community. The  classic of the first half of this century, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching  (;od (1y37), is almost universally acknowledged as an encoded text on the  formation of an African-American woman's community evolving from heterosexual,   social dependence on black men into a very strong community of  women that, according to Marjorie Pryse, "recreates the tradition of female  friendship and shared understanding and heals the lingering impact of separation   imposed by slavery and sexism" (t 5). Rather than attempt to occupy  the discourse of history, from which black American women have been excluded   even more thoroughly than white women, African-American women  writers (with Hurston as the twentieth-century leader) have unearthed the  buried languages of African-American folk traditions and community (2-4).  The result, for its late in the century, is that in African-American women's  writing, history is nearly abolished. Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)  is the most famous text in which "black history becomes firmly rooted in the  network of female friendship" (Pryse 20) and, thereby is removed from male  control.

Kreyling’s analysis of Smith’s Oral History does a good job of showing how this novel exemplifies these differences.  For example, he observes that, “Dory is horn at the center of it community   the male literally cannot register because that community is in its  very constitution beyond his "history." (loc 1775-6)  Also, “Oral History signifies on traditional images of the origin and nature of  southern community in history, even as it pleads for a redefinition of community   in the woman's register.” 

Kreyling’s discussion of race in this work is quite interesting.  He says that, “bypassing of the traditional reading of the tragedy of race in the southern  narrative and suggests that it might always have been, as Welty', feminine  eye had seen in Delta Wedding, it learned pattern of male imitation, not an  essential tragedy of the community as it living whole.”  Even more importantly is his observation that “Lillian Smith, before Fried Green Tomatoes, and Dorothy  Allison in Bastard out of Carolina ( 1092) since, have used the same coupling  of sexual abuse with racial terrorism to stigmatize the male community.”  He also looks at the centrality of women’s lives to history; in Jill McCorkle’s work, for example, “pregnancy and birth  are shown to be at the center of the process of identity making. Men are irrelevant   after impregnation.”

Ultimately, he concludes that

What is powerful in the fiction of contemporary white southern women is their common, if not concerted, challenge to the Quentin thesis. It is not  that the prevailing literary historical and critical apparatus is or must he, in all instances, totally dismembered but rather that it must be seen as man-made,   the product not only of a time and a social condition (though that  would he had enough When the assertions are of "transcendent" meaning)  but of gender too. Through the heyday of "modern" southern writing, from the 1920s, of the renaissance, through various announcements of its end, to  the prophecy of a second rebirth by those who look to the African-American  male writer as savior rather than propagandist, the canon has been presented   as essentially linked to an ideal of southern community conceived in  history but transcending the materialism of historical circumstances. The  emergence of southern women's writing, however, makes that literary orthodoxy   seem partial, at best. What is emerging in southern literature, to confound   the critical attempts of traditional defenders to extend the hegemony  of renaissance ideology, is a body of work by white women writers that calls  up "forgotten" meanings of precursor texts and proposes a new configuration  of southern "community." The more defenders try to stretch the Quentin  thesis to fit historical/social change, the more the thesis thins at its weakest  seams.

Ironically, after all of this, Kreyling then spent two chapters discussing Faulkner—although his discussion of Faulkner is one in which he identifies Faulkner as suffering from an anxiety of his own influence.

Barbara Ladd--Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (2007)

In this book, Ladd undertakes, “under the rubric of gender,…an exploration of choice and agency in the modernist engagement with authorship and in the act of writing itself” (4).  Looking primarily at Faulkner, Hurston, and Welty allows Ladd to focus on a time period during which “the era of order and clear trajectories was over,” during which “the aesthetics of authorship would be formed on the breakdown of the unified subject theorized in the work of Freud and on the concurrent breakdown of empire, which challenged History” (4).  Capital-H-History is important to Ladd, as she is most interested in ways in which these authors challenged, undermined, or resisted History through their work (in particular, the ways in which their own undermined authorship functioned in this way).  History supports and is a product of empire; History excludes, and excludes primarily women.  Ladd, then, uses gender as her focus in this study because the system of empire excludes women—“only the women prove resistant, but that is because they are already ‘chained’ to what Julia Kristeva has called ‘biological fate’—interpellation doesn’t ‘take’” (3). 

Desire—especially female desire—is central to Ladd’s study.  Rejecting a Freudian/Platonic/Lacanian understanding of desire, which equates desire with “lack,” Ladd instead relies upon an understanding of desire as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, one sees desire as productive and connected to passion: “Desire always remains in close touch with the conditions of objective existence; it embraces them and follows them, shifts when they shift” (Deleuze and Guattari, quoted in Ladd 9).  Additionally, Ladd sees desire in terms of the sublime, which she defines as “the representation of something vast, overmastering, and oblivious to desire that, paradoxically, authorizes cultural agency in the West” (9). 

As Ladd discusses throughout the work, an encounter with the sublime authorizes a person to tell his story, as he has “lived to tell the tale.”  As many have pointed out, the sublime has traditionally been seen as the realm of the male; there are few stories of the feminine experience with the sublime (which is odd, Ladd notes, as one would expect, for example, pregnancy and childbirth to be perfect topics to be mined for just stories).[1]  For example, Ladd points to Edmund Burke as one influential example of this gendered view of the sublime: “While he associates the realm of the beautify with sociability and reproduction (and women), he associates the sublime with the assertion of human power, an instinct for self-preservation and self-mastery in the face of an encounter with terror” (46).  Ladd intends to “examine the sublime as a concept for feminism and an experience for women and other submerged populations to demonstrate some of the ways in which the sublime underwrites narratives of resistance to the circumstances of desire.  A confrontation with fatality can be productive” (10).  Importantly, she says that “There is something that remains after the interpellation of gender, a shared imaginary that has to do with desire, production, and exchange and is available to both male and female” (11).  She looks at these points of crossover in the authors she examines: she sees that “a female corporeal imaginary, even a maternal one, as we shall see in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, is available to a male writer, as a conduit to freedom.  A male corporeal imaginary, as we will see in Welty’s “Music from Spain” and Hurston’s Tell My Horse, is available to a female writer and is likewise a means to freedom” (11). 

Ladd looks at authors from the American South because the patriarchal and paternalistic foundations of southern ideology are not unique to the South, but they "were made explicit and instrumentalized in a slave economy that subjected southern women (black and white, rich and poor) and African American men to a disciplinary regime in which some were spiritualized and others imagined as animals, in which the only recognized options for some were to sublimate both self and body to the race or to God or to face the violation of both self and body in cruder exploitations" (13).  Further, she explains her focus on this particular time period by the emergence of the modern woman at this time: “The difference between the traditional woman and the modern one had to do with fatality….Autonomy and sovereignty had been constructed on the backs of subordinates, slaves, and women” (15).

Ladd first looks at Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying (1930).  In Addie, Ladd claims that Faulkner creates a “voice of a very different kind of woman indeed, a restless, angry, idealistic, speaking subject in possession of something that Western culture thought women could not possess, which would have been referred to at that time as ‘mind’ and which we are more likely to think of today as the desire to remake the world and the self in the mastery of language” (17).  Ladd makes important connections between Faulkner and the work of Evelyn Scott, particularly her 1923 semi-autobiographical work Escapade.  In As I Lay Dying, Ladd identifies Faulkner’s achievement as “his reimagining of the figure of the women in the scene of the sublime in a way that speaks to (and speaks back to) male anxieties as they concerned the impact of modernity on women and the impact of women on modernity” (48).

Important to my work, Ladd identifies the sublime experience as “a crisis of gender typically represented by the male writer as a feminizing as well as authorizing moment in the portrait of the artist as a young man….the sublime disfigures and disables masculinity in order to refigure and enable it.  Whether that disfiguration takes the form of a physical hurt (blindness or maiming) or a mental one exhibited in the form of cognitive, emotional, or psychic ‘impairment’ or ‘distortion,’ it will be visible” (48).  I think this speaks to my understanding of the Medusa interaction in Welty in some way.

Ladd’s consideration of Welty is primarily concerned with the ways in which “Welty instrumentalizes gender, embracing in a spirit of comic undoing the masculinist economy of History in its hostility to women” (52-3).  By comparing Welty’s “A Worn Path” with the characters of Clytie and Jim Bond in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Ladd shows that Welty’s story “shifts the perspective to foreground the experiential reality of a black and female figure, the kind of figure who, in Faulkner’s story as in official History, is hardly more than the decentered guardian of the remains of the white male body” (55).  She further compares the female listeners in Welty’s stories to the male ones in Faulkner’s work: “It is the indifference of Welty’s women and girls, the possibility that at any moment a certain character might fly off in another direction, not ‘hear’ the rest of the story, escape History if only for a moment, that constitutes one of the ‘obstructions’ upon which Welty her constructs her very historical stories” (58).  Such “indifference,” as Ladd characterizes it, is very different from, say Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses (or even Quentin Compson), for whom listening is necessary to discovering his identity.  Ladd’s distinction of Welty’s characters to those of Faulkner continues, as she describes the ways in which Welty characters differ in their approach to History, which she characterizes as “a satirical displacement of Faulknerian History from the constitutive to the ornamental.  The representation of History as something worn upon the body rather than as something that constitutes the body is shaped by race and gender” (59).  In other words, it seems that perhaps Welty’s characters are aware of their own interpellation because of their marginalization in ways that Faulkner’s characters are not.

I am intrigued by Ladd’s analysis of the idea of “indifference,” which she says “pertains to a specific conceptualization of freedom: the freedom of indifference is defined as the power to choose to act altogether differently from the way one chose to act” (59).  I wonder if it’s possible to apply this definition of indifference vis-á-vis freedom to appearance, to women who are regarded as ugly because of indifference (I’m thinking of the woman in “Curtain of Green,” for example).  Further, Ladd talks about women who are invisible in their world, but visible in Welty’s stories because they are “clearly in the sights of the reader” (62): “for a woman, who is so often more aware of being looked at than of herself looking, ‘looking about’ is a rare privilege.  That kind of invisibility is freedom, a freedom of indifference wherein other choices are possible, and is associated with authorship in Welt’s work” (62).  Again, I think this may have some bearing on my understanding of the interactive nature of ugliness, especially (but not only) in Welty’s work.  Further, Ladd directly addresses those characters who are associated with Medusa, noting that the “real problem is not so much that the heroines see themselves as monstrous as that the patriarchal narrative constructs them in such terms, leaving them with only two choices—to concur in their immersion into the repetitive regime of the everyday or to resist, to embrace their ‘contrariety’” (64).  Again, I think this has real bearing on the seeming ubiquity of the ugly woman in this work.

Ladd goes on to consider Faulkner’s A Fable and Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse in terms of gender reversal in authorship.  She sees Faulkner relying upon a “feminized semiotics of discourse” (81) in A Fable which is similar to that of As I Lay Dying, and she sees Hurston using a particularly performative identity (one which might almost be considered as pseudonymous as that of Mark Twain) in order to gain access to the privileged position of a white male voice (129).  These are interesting discussions, but not nearly as central to my work as her first two chapters.

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[1] What about the Gothic novel?  Isn’t that a textbook example of the feminine encounter with the sublime?  Or perhaps Ladd would argue that the “feminine Gothic,” with its mysteries explained, falls into the Hegelian paradigm that women encounter beauty, and only men the sublime (in terms of the “masculine Gothic” which features real mystery).

Suzanne Marrs--Eudora Welty: A Biography (2005)

In this beautiful and comprehensive authorized biography, Marrs draws upon extensive archival work as well as interviews with Welty herself to fully illustrate Welty’s life.  Published only four years after Welty’s death at the age of 91, Marrs writes about Welty’s life chronologically, assigning themes from the work of Welty and other writers to periods of her life ranging from five to twenty years. 

Perhaps most important to my own work is Marrs’ discussion of the unauthorized biography written by AnnWaldron, particularly “Waldron’s decidedly antifeminist focus on Eudora’s appearance, on remarks stressing her homeliness as it was offset by her winning personality” (565).  I will reproduce her comments at length here, as I think they’re important:

Waldron asserts that in 1984, when she was named on of “Ten Great Faces” by People magazine, Eudora had at last triumphed over the conventional belles of her youth.  My own sure sense is that Eudora measured triumph in far different terms, and that Waldron had access to few pictures of Eudora, many of which reveal both her physical and intellectual attractiveness over the years, her truly beautiful eyes alight with interest in the world.  Depending on her pose, of course, Eudora in photographs could seem either statuesque or awkwardly tall; somber, handsome, and dignified or smiling a bit too broadly; well-coifed or disheveled.  But she was not interested in striking poses, in spending hours in a beauty shop, in applying makeup, in amassing a vast wardrobe.  It is true that Eudora was occasionally self-denigrating when discussing her appearance.  To a visiting Reynolds, who was eager to set out for dinner and urged her to stop primping in front of a mirror, the sixty-something writer lamented, “You haven’t had to live behind this face all these years.”  A decade or so later, I suggested that Eudora resembled her mother, only to be contradicted: “No.  My mother was a beautiful woman.”  Then early in the 1990s, I was surprised to hear Eudora and Charlotte Capers agree that their mothers had always wanted them to be prettier, and I was taken aback when Eudora told us of a comment Katherine Anne Porter had made to her: “You will never know what is means to be a beautiful woman.”  Probably Eudora agreed, failing to see that beauty that Reynolds, John Robinson, Ken Millar, and a host of others saw in her, but she was not tormented by the issue.  Her comments about beauty were always matter-of-fact, and she had long been dismissive of the American obsession with cosmetic enhancements.  In the thirties, friends had photographed Eudora in a mock Helena Rubinstein/Elizabeth Arden pose.  A decade later Eudora’s story “Hello and Good-Bye” satirically depicted two rather shallow-minded beauty contestants participating in a photo shoot. (566)

I’m also interested in her responses to Flannery O’Connor, whom she met at the Southern Literary Festival at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1962, and described as having “ a real sharp tongue, all rightie!” (291).  According to Marrs, “Only Flannery O’Connor’s lecture transcended Eudora’s rejection of religious writing.  ‘Her lecture was funny besides holy.  ‘People ask me why it is that Southerners write about freaks.  I tell them it’s because we can still recognize one.’  ‘They call Southern novels ‘grotesque’ except when they are grotesque & then they call them ‘realistic.’ (She said it better than that.)” (291).

Marrs also quotes from Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court (1942), in which Bowen’s reflections on the significance of place echoes with Welty’s own ideas: “The dead do not need to visit Bowen’s Court rooms—as I said we had no ghosts in that house—because they already permeate them…The land outside Bowen’s Court windows left prints on my ancestors’ eyes that looked out: perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene.  If so, those prints are part of the scene for me” (199 [from Bowen 451]).  Marrs sees a connection between Bowen’s statement and Welty’s own 1944 essay “Some Notes on River Country” (200).

Finally, I was personally moved by so much of the material which Marrs quotes.  Most moving to me is in the section titled “The Strong Present Tense: 1974-1980,” a time period during which Welty lost many of those closest to her.  In a letter to her beloved Ken Millar regarding the death of her friend Frank Lyell, she says, “I know I’m at an age when the loss of friends is not considered surprising,…I am not going to learn to accept it for being not surprising, I’m going to hate it & protest it straight ahead—I’m indignant for their sakes—up to my last breath.  I testify to their absence” (428).  This is the brilliance of Welty: to take such complex emotions as those of grieving and convey them in such a direct, palpable way.

Ellen Glasgow--Barren Ground (1925)

This beautiful novels follows the life of protagonist Dorinda Oakley, a woman from very rural Virginia, for thirty years.  Dorinda, daughter of a land‐poor farmer in Virginia, at 20 goes to work in Nathan Pedlar's store. She falls in love with Jason Greylock, weak‐willed son of the village doctor, and forgets her purpose of helping her father to rebuild the farm.  However, the day before their planned wedding Jason instead marries a former fiancée, later claiming that he was forced to marry her. Bitterly disillusioned and pregnant, Dorinda seeks work in New York, where she is injured and miscarries after being hit by a taxi. She is attended by Dr. Faraday, who later employs her as a nurse for his children. 

Dorinda returns to the family farm as her father is dying, finding the farm impoverished and overgrown with broomsedge. Having studied scientific agriculture in New York, she introduces progressive methods, gradually returning the “barren ground” to fertility and creating a prosperous dairy farm. Her mother becomes an invalid, after her brother Rufus is questioned for murder, so that Dorinda must carry on with only the aid of a few farm laborers. After her mother's death she marries Nathan Pedlar, to provide a home for his children.  Though she doesn’t love Nathan with the same romance with which he loves her, she has real respect for Nathan which allows the two of them to have a rather stable and financially successful marriage.  Nathan, often overlooked because of his lack of looks and quiet ways, dies a hero’s death after rescuing people from a train accident.  After he dies she shelters Jason, now penniless and ill from excessive drinking. He soon dies.  The novel ends with Dorinda taking to her own bed, echoing her own mother’s final admission of exhaustion.  

Throughout the novel, Dorinda struggles with desire for happiness, contentment, and ease of mind: they seem to be incompatible.  After her young romance with Jason which leaves her emotionally (and physically) scarred, Dorinda is insistent on putting such sentimental nonsense behind her.  This struggle between sentiment and pragmatism is an overarching throughout the novel: not just in relationships between people, but also in the relationship between people and the land.  While Dorinda may (mostly) be able to keep her feelings for other people outside the realm of the sentimental, her attachment to the land and her family farm is another story.  Certainly, the hard work which Dorinda invests in her family farm does pay off, but also reveals what emotional attachments are beyond her control.  Even the sections of the novel—“Broomsedge,” “Pine,” and “Life Everlasting”—are plant names used as metaphors to illustrate Dorinda’s relationship to herself and the land.  

This is a beautifully written and moving novel.  Pre-dating both Tobacco Road and Gone with the Wind (and even Cold Mountain), it seems to be to have been a strong influence on both of them.  My only complaint is the rather uneven treatment of race throughout.  African Americans throughout the novel are consistently characterized as an inferior and lazy race, despite the outstanding individuals such as Fluvella, without whose support Dorinda simply wouldn’t have survived.  Compared to others in the novel, Dorinda’s racism is perhaps a more benevolent form, but her failure to grasp the real-life conditions of the African Americans on whose labor her own survival depends is a weakness in an otherwise sensitive depiction of a life struggling against rural poverty.