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?

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.

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.

Zora Neale Hurston--Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Hurston’s second novel, it tells the story of Janie Crawford, a woman in her forties who returns to her home in Eatonville after the death of her second husband, Tea Cake, and tells her story to her best friend Pheoby.  Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men: Logan Killicks, an older man whom her grandmother marries her off to who just wants a wife to keep his home and help on the farm; Joe Starks, the romantic who whisks her off to Eatonville who wants her as his trophy wife to reinforce his image as a powerful man, and Tea Cake, who woos her with his guitar and takes her to “the muck” (the Everglades) to work with him and have what is generally presented as an equitable marriage. 

When she is young, Janie has an idealistic, romantic idea of love, informed by a picturesque vision of bees pollinating a pear tree.  One reading of this novel is as a feminist text, as Janie can be seen as a woman who pursues her desires and is not afraid to leave one man for another or claim her place in traditionally masculine spaces such as the porch.  On the other hand, there are those who see the physical violence which is inextricably linked to sexuality and love within these relationships as mitigating any proto-feminist readings. 

Hurston has also been criticized for her portrayal of African Americans in her work, especially for her use of dialect which many see as offensive.  However, as an anthropologist who trained with Franz Boas, Hurston was attempting to capture the sense of the people of whom she wrote.  Other criticisms of her work point out her failure to address the effect of racism on these people.  As the primary setting of the novel is a predominantly African American community, such lack of racism occurs because there are few white people in the novel.  Rather, the white women at the end of the novel who show solidarity for Janie through their voting her innocent while she is on trial for shooting and killing Tea Cake (after he, in the blind rage of rabies, tries to shoot her) are shown in opposition to the black men who oppose Janie’s innocence and demand retribution for Tea Cake’s death.  Her return to Eatonville and reunion with Janie, when considered along with the solidarity of the white women and the fierce protection of her grandmother when she was a child, make an interesting argument for sisterhood over racial solidarity.