Helen Ellis--Eating the Cheshire Cat (2000)

This novel was recommended by a lovely person I met at the Dickens Universe this summer, after she learned about my dissertation topic.  I had to get it through Inter-Library Loan--though now that I've read it, I'm quite surprised that I haven't heard more about it.  What a fantastic read!

It follows three young women in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from summer camp to college.  Opening with a harrowing account of Sarina's mother attack on her in an attempt to fix her disfigured fingers, it follows her friendship with Nicole, who's mother is even more intent on her daughter's physical and social perfection, as well as the experiences of Bitty Jack, the daughter of the summer camp caretakers whose life continues to intersect with those of Sarina and Nicole.

Nicole's mother makes clear the connection between the South and rigid expectations of femininity in her succinct statement, "“…this is the South.  We roll our hair and we wear lip gloss” (66). 

One thing this novel emphasizes is that women who make the choice to be ugly do so from a position of privilege.  Little Jack's ugly physical appearance is linked to her lower socioeconomic status; she would certainly not choose it, if she could:  “She wondered if she would ever outgrow what her mama called her awkward stage.  Could she ever afford new glasses?  Could she dress better? Wear makeup so it looked right?  Would her acne ever clear?  Would her hair lose the oil, gain body, gain bounce?” (26).

Unlike Little Jack, those who choose to be ugly occupy a position of privilege; they choose ugliness as a form of rebellion, usually against insistent (or in this novel, draconian) mothers who are adamant about ensuring that their daughters will fit properly into the marriage economy.  In order to choose ugliness, young women must first have access to the system in order to choose to opt out of it.  For Nicole, making herself ugly is an attempt to connect to her friend Sarina.  Nicole's obsession with Sarina is both a way of rebelling against her mother (who doesn't approve of the friendship) as well as an expression of lesbian desire, which is strictly forbidden in this community: “With Sarina, Nicole made an effort to play down her beauty.  She didn’t powder her nose.  A zit was like a door prize that she’d never try to hide.  Who cared what her date thought?  Not Nicole—one single bit.  Her unfinished face put Sarina at ease.  When Sarina was at ease, she was more attentive to Nicole.  She accompanied her to the rest room, to get popcorn, refill their drinks.  Anytime Nicole could steal Sarina from her date” (66).  

In contrast to Sarina’s and Nicole’s mothers, whose insistence on their daughter’s beauty provokes rebellion, Bitty Jack’s mother sees beauty even in the freaks. Upon witnessing “Little Miss Hose and Pony,” she whispers, “She has such a pretty face” (89).  Though she does not consciously make herself ugly, like Nicole, Bitty Jack's appearance is, to a certain extent, also mutable, especially once she learns how context-dependent value judgments about appearances are.  When she gets a job in a freak show, hosing off Johnny Iguana, the “Freak Boss” says, “You’ll get along fine with him.  I can tell.  You wouldn’t be here unless you was an ugly duckling once yourself,” to which Bitty Jack replies, “I’m no swan” (81).  At the freak show, however, the Freak Boss tells Bitty, “You’re not chicken shit…around here, you’ll be the belle of the ball….What you got?  Glasses?  Skin that’ll clear up sooner or later.  Freckles.  You’re skinny, but you’re nothing to turn your nose up at” (81).  

The Freak Boss has a clear understanding of the benefits of ugliness.  Regaling Bitty Jack with the story of the 300 pound woman who fell into the Pick a Duck pool, who “was flailing around like a pig in shit….Poor ducks were stuck in every crevice of her body,” he goes on to say that “Someone got the whole ugly incident on camera.  Won ten grand on that goddamned embarrassing video show,” and he ultimately wonders whether she staged the whole thing (92-3).
 

At the fair, Bitty Jack's ugliness gets her access (and training) that allow her success—winning the big pig prize which eluded Stewart.  When we first see Stewart and Sarina at the fair, we’re tempted to believe them that the games are fixed, although Sarina’s response to the Pick a Duck game—“The ugly bitch behind the counter kept giving Stewart small prizes” (54) seems excessive.  When we later learn that the ugly bitch is, in fact, Bitty Jack, it illuminates the kind of unique power which ugliness grants Bitty Jack.

Bitty Jack’s account of the story includes her own self-appraisal: “Bitty knew she was no swan.  Her beauty wasn’t storybookish: no dragon returns to find Bitty’s face morphed into a pot of gold.  She still had to wear glasses.  The shower was a war zone against combination skin.  But she wasn’t the same girl she was at thirteen.  Bitty knew she had bettered.  She looked different, but not that different” (95).  The power she holds over the Pick a Duck game is to give the small prize—the plush snake—in exchange for every duck that Stewart picks, and to refuse to give a purple snake, Sarina’s requested prize if they can’t win the big prize of the plush pig.  As Stewart’s frustration mounts with each additional consolation prize snake, “Within minutes, Sarina stood like Medusa’s maid of honor.  A wilted bouquet of bold-colored snakes drooper from her grasp” (96).  

It is significant that she is Medusa’s maid of honor, and not Medusa herself.  In this scenario, Bitty does not grant Sarina the full power of Medusa.  Instead, Bitty Jack retains her power, and it is her silent stare which drives Sarina mad, making enough of a commotion that she is asked to leave the fair (96-97).

What this novel ultimately emphasizes is that ugliness in the South is synonymous with rebellion and dissent.  After Nicole’s bloody cutting experience at the Tri Delt house, and her attack on her mother at the Tri Delt Poker Party, the incident is referred to as an “ugly situation” (178)--an extreme version of the warning given by so many southern mothers to their children to not "be ugly."  What Eating the Cheshire Cat does is highlight how the imperative for southern women to fit into such narrow parameters of beauty results in a desire and drive to "be ugly"--both in appearance and in behavior.

Lucy Furman--The Quare Women: A Story of the Kentucky Mountains (1923)

I finally read all of this novel with the intriguing title.  The "Quare Women" of the title refers to the "passel of quare women come in from furrin parts," settlement workers who come to the remote mountain town of Troublesome to teach basic skills, cooking, hygiene, as well as arts and crafts.  The novel includes points of view of both the locals as well as the outsiders, though the "locals" are made distinct through their dialects.  (Surely, women from "level country" of Kentucky would have some sort of dialect as well.)

The novel is based on Furman's own experiences with the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky.  What I most appreciated about the novel was that it didn't blame the mountaineers troubles--violence and poor health being two of the primary ones--on some sort of innate character, but on its isolation and lack of education.  Uncle Ephraim, the town elder, gives a speech to that effect, explaining that when their ancestors settled there, they were educated people-but over time, as their isolation led to less and less education and contact with the progress of the outside world, the new generations were more prone to violence, to excess drinking, and to needless death from illness.  Though there is resistance at first, even the most adamantly opposed to the outside influences, such as Uncle Lot, for example.  Lot is sure that they're an example of the kind of "strange women" warned against in the Bible by Solomon: "The lips of a strange woman drop honey, and her mouth is smoother than butter; yea, the furrin woman is a norow pit, and they that are abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein'" (24).  Eventually, however, even Uncle Lot admits that theirs is a beneficial influence, as not only do they bring medicine to treat typhoid, but the activities they bring have such a good influence that they bring a truce to the long-running mountain feud.

Though they are "quare," these women are not unattractive.  In fact, part of what makes them "quare" is the fact that they are are so pretty and yet unmarried, some of them nearing thirty.  As most of the mountain women are married and procreating by the age of 15, to be unmarried and 28 is unheard of.  However, the mountain women who do marry young have difficult lives, which is reflected in their faces.  Cynthy, for example, looks older than her mother Ailsie: "Cynthy's face being so lined and drawn from the troubles she had had as Fighting Fult's wife and widow" (46).  People's visages reflect their home and geography.  As Isabel rides the train further and further into the mountains, she observes that, "The progressive change in the people who got into and off the train all along the way was as striking as the changing topography.  It was hard to believe that all could belong to the same state" (64).

It felt almost like cheating to read such a straight-ahead narrative as the novel from 1923. Part of the experience was simply the aesthetic experience of reading such a beautiful book:

I was expecting the quare women to be uglier, to reflect the southern idea that ugliness is a sign of intellectualness.  Instead, this book is more suitable for my chapter on ugliness as "history marked on the body."  A fun read, despite the dialect.

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.

Erving Goffman--Stigma: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1978)

Goffman identifies the process through which we determine stigma, a characteristic which he importantly identifies as a relational one:

Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories.  Social settings establish the categories of persons likely to be encountered there.  The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. (2)

Or, more specifically, “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed….stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype” (2). [1] Observing that “the person with stigma is not quite human” (3), Goffman explains that the our unconscious assumptions lead us to “exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances” (3)—an observation which echoes Butler’s ideas about intelligibility. 

Goffman also echoes Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, noting that stigma reduces a person in the mind from being a “whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (2).  He then turns to the possible reactions of those who are stigmatized, which include trying to correct the stigma, or focusing his attention to mastery of one particular area related to his shortcoming, or, he can “break with what is called reality, and obstinately attempt to employ an unconventional interpretation of the character of his social identity” (6).  Goffman’s focus is what he calls “‘mixed contacts’—the moments when stigmatized and normal are in the same ‘social situation,’ that is, in one another’s immediate physical presence” (8)—and notes that most normals and stigmatized will arrange their lives to minimize such moments of mixed contact.  At such moments, the stigmatized may be unsure how he will be identified and received (9), and may have to work at the impression he is making.  Further, stigmatized people are vulnerable to invasions of privacy, with perfect strangers feeling comfortable starting personal conversations.  On the other hand, “normals” in such situations may find themselves hyperaware of their own reactions, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.

One thing which is interesting to note is that Goffman identifies that “no matter how small and how badly off a particular stigmatized category is, the viewpoint of its members is likely to be given public presentation of some kind.”  The result of this is that “Americans who are stigmatized tend to live in a literarily-defined world” (25).  Additionally, I’m also interested in what Goffman terms “disidentifiers”: “a sign that tends—in fact or hope—to break up an otherwise coherent picture but in this case in a positive direction…not so much establishing a new claim as throwing severe doubt on the validity of the virtual one” (43)—in other words, markers which allow one to “pass” as a normal, or at least less stigmatized.

Most importantly, Goffman addresses ugliness directly in his discussion of visibility of stigma:

the visibility of a stigma (as well as its obtrusiveness) must be disentangled from certain possibilities of what can be called its “perceived focus.”  We normals develop conceptions, whether objectively grounded or not, as to the sphere of life-activity for which an individual’s particular stigma primarily disqualifies him.  Ugliness, for example, has its initial and prime effect during social situations, threatening the pleasure we might otherwise take in the company of its possessor.  We perceive, however, that his competency in solitary tasks, although of course we may discriminate against him here simply because of the feelings we have about looking at him.  Ugliness, then, is a stigma that is focused on social situations. (49).

This is in contrast to a less visible stigma, such as diabetes, which have “no initial effect on the individual’s qualifications for face-to-face interactions” (49).  While I take Goffman’s point about the immediacy of ugliness’s visibility, I think that (a) ugliness is often used as a marker of characteristics which are not physical (as in, the Lord don’t like ugly, or don’t be ugly); and (b) while ugliness is certainly relational, as Goffman characterizes stigmas to be, I think that it is much more complicated than his characterization as being primarily one of social situations.

Also important to my work is his observation that “although impersonal contacts between strangers are particularly subject to stereotypical responses, as persons come to be on closer terms with each other this categoric approach recedes and gradually sympathy, understanding, and a realistic assessment of personal qualities takes its place” (51).  This observation certainly must be considered in my analysis of Scarlett O’Hara.  This leads Goffman to conclude that “stigma management, then, might be seen as something that pertains mainly to public life” (51)—but again, I think this characterization of “public life, to contact between strangers or mere acquaintances, to one end of a continuum whose other pole is intimacy” (51) should be more nuanced in my consideration.  It further makes me think of the relationship between appearance, how appearance is read, what happens in that intersubjective space between viewer and viewed, and the effect on identity.

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[1] I’m also quite intrigued by the relationship he sets up between the stigmatized and the normal person—what Goffman characterizes as the person he is “normal against” (4)—the use of “against” here is really interesting.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

While some say that this novel defies genre, I’d say rather that it’s much more fully a memoir than most, in that it captures a much more complete picture of Kingston’s girlhood than if she had restricted herself to simply dates, names, and events.  There are names, dates, and events, with scenes set in her childhood home and the laundry her parents ran and the children worked at.  There are scenes at school, of cruelty and play.  But there are also more mythopoetic scenes, of a girlhood taken up into the sky to be trained as a bird and then as a dragon.  There are stories of her ancestors, of women being stoned to death for adultery and men who leave their wives behind in China to create new lives—with new wives—in America.

But primarily, this is a story about women, and about identity, and how a Chinese-American woman discovers her own identity between and within these two cultures.  Her own knowledge of how her ancestors suffered for being female—whether for being found pregnant and unmarried, which led to infanticide and suicide for that un-acknowledged aunt in China, or watching her own aunt suffer as she discovers that the husband who has financially supported her for years in China has taken a new wife in America—weighs on and informs Kingston, who strives to emulate the other stories of Chinese women, those of the dragon women, the women warriors for whom the book is named.  Even the women whose stories she recounts who survive physically often end up—in America, at least—committed to insane asylums, demonstrating the difficulty so many women have balancing the often contradictory requirements of the two cultures.  Kingston’s answer, in this beautiful prose, is to be a warrior, a dragon woman, one who knows how to recognize dragons in the landscape.

Houston Baker, Jr.--Turning South Again (2001)

Generally, Baker’s text is a reconsideration of the South from the perspective of an African American academic: “a black southern mind navigating oceans and landfalls of memory, ineradicable dilemmas of black modernism, protocols of black male subject formation” (2).  By focusing on the ideas of Booker T. Washington specifically in relation to the ideas of black modernism, Baker performs a highly critical analysis of the effects of Washington’s ideas, particularly those which resulted in the stasis and ultimate immobilization of blacks in America.  Starting with chattel slavery, though the convict-leasing program, sharecropping, and the penal system today, Baker contends that the story of blacks in America is one of immobilization, one which needs access to modernity in order to escape.  Through discussions of traditional images of modernity—in particular, Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s description of the flaneur figure—Baker highlights how the mobility characteristic of these images were not available to blacks in America.

For my purposes, Baker’s occasional discussions of physical appearance in the literature he discusses is quite enlightening.  For example, he points to “The all-American caricature of the “Yankee” schoolmarm paints her as a crabbed, aged, old maid fiddling with books, cats, and outcasts.  W. J. Cash captures this stereotype when he writes in The Mind of the South as follows: ‘Generally horsefaced, bespectacled, and spare of frame, she was, of course, no proper intellectual, but at best a comic character, at worst a dangerous fool, playing with explosive forces which she did not understand’ (140).  Contrary to stereotype and caricature, however, the ‘Yankee’ womanhood that made its way South after the War was often young, literate, predominantly white, and in the age range of twenty to thirty years old” (45).  More importantly, he points out, “Nothing is more threatening to the southern real than the critical, informed, articulate, healthy black-mass body, en proper personne” (76).  In this way, the non-conforming body (particularly, the black female body) poses a threat by its very existence to the status quo.