Flannery O'Connor--A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)

A Good Man is Hard to Find is O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, which followed her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952.  This collection includes both “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” two of my favorite of her stories.  Its stories contain over references to what O’Connor referred to as the “Christ-haunted South,” such as the story “A River, in which a young white boy is taken to a river baptism by his babysitter Mrs. Connin.  The childish point of view in “A River” provides a sardonic and yet tragic take on charismatic religion, as the boy finds Mrs. Connin’s religious ceremony quite educational: “He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.  Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke….If he had thought about it before today, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “dam” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime” (160).  He is so inspired by the baptism that he finds his way back to the river to baptize himself, and the story ends with him being carried downstream alone.

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” one-armed Mr. Tom T. Shiftlet from Tarwater, Tennessee, appears at the home of Lucynell Crater and her deaf adolescent daughter by the same name.  The one-armed man fixes things around their home, works on their dead car, and teaches the deaf girl to say words.  The mother arranges Mr. Shiftlet’s marriage to the daughter, negotiating a price for the Shiftlet to take her daughter, throwing in the car and the farm.  After their marriage at the courthouse, Shiftlet abandons the girl at a diner on their alleged honeymoon in a strange, short story which reverberates with the male abandonment in “Good Country People.” 

Several stories make reference to the effects of war, particularly WWII.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby deal with her shiftless brother Rufus, back from but seemingly unchanged by the European Theater.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby, like Shiftlet, contemplates the possibility of life without a heart as she denies her actual state of pregnancy.  The two women in “A Circle in the Fire” cite the atrocities in Europe as things to be grateful for are happening at a distance.  “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” follows General Sash, 104-year-old veteran whose appearance in his military regalia makes him a symbol of “old traditions!  Dignity! Honor! Courage!” (253).  The General was not actually a general, but a soldier in the Civil War, and has no memory of that, losing a son in the Spanish-American War, or other history than receiving his uniform twelve years ago for the premiere of Gone with the Wind.  And in “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. McIntyre struggles to cope with the changes wrought by the arrival of refugees from Poland.  She is able to adapt only to a certain extent, however; while she tolerates the idea of locals marrying Polish people in order to bring them over, when the displaced people try to marry local black people, a line is crossed.  She watches Mr. Guizac, the Polish man who attempts to arrange this marriage, be run over by a tractor, and fails to alert anyone to the accident before it happens. 

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost” has an interesting vision of female ugliness:

All week end the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Tow, shaking with laughter and getting so read and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway.  They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses.  They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look a their legs. (197)

These girls are described as boycrazy morons, so once again, ugliness is a marker of female sexuality.  Although this is the judgment of the twelve-year-old narrator, she, too, is described as ugly, though more in her behavior than in her appearance.  After the cook asks why she must be so ugly all of the time, she connects her ugliness to her being too smart for her own good (203).  In this story, the older girls ridicule the notion of their bodies as “temples of the holy ghost” as their convent teachers insist; the narrator, on the other hand, in her interest in becoming a saint, contemplates her own body’s abilities to be an actual temple in her pursuit of sainthood.

“The Artificial Nigger,” like many of the stories in this collection, depicts country people unable to handle modernity.  Mr. Head, from a rural area of Georgia where they’ve run all of the black people out, takes his grandson Nelson to Atlanta in an attempt to introduce Nelson to the wonders of the big city.  They are so out of their element, however, that they become lost and desperate.  Nelson’s life in the country has been so sheltered that he has never seen a person of color, and he is overwhelmed by the black people he encounters in Atlanta.  At the end of the story, they see what to the reader is an offensive stereotype statue of a black man eating watermelon.  However, to Mr. Head and Nelson, this statue is terrifying; as Mr. Head notes, “They ain’t got enough real ones here.  They got to have an artificial one” (230).

Throughout these stories, themes of rural people who have trouble adapting to a changing world repeat.  The cultural clashes are often race-based (as “The Displaced Person” reveals, such race-based conflicts are not always Caucasian versus African-American), and the conflicts usually have extreme, grotesque results.  Certainly, there is a strong threat of dark humor which runs throughout, but it is a usually tied to the grotesque in some way.

Erskine Caldwell--Tobacco Road (1932)

Toward the end of Tobacco Road, preacher Sister Bessie Rice, explains why it’s better to preach against things rather than for things, because “That’s what the people like to hear about.  They want to hear about the bad things” (161).  This may be the theme for the entire novel, as the characters in the novel live in inescapably desperate poverty.  Tobacco Road is a trap—though it was once, a few generations ago, the successful place of transport for tobacco, the changeover to sharecropping cotton resulted in leached soil, an inequitable sharecropping system, the growth of cotton factories, and eventually the pullout of the boss, which resulted in the general collapse of the area.  With a very few exceptions, the only road for survival is escape—of the seventeen children born by Jeeter and Ada Lester, only two have remained at home: the harelipped and hypersexualized Ellie Mae and the simpleminded Dude, whose only interests are throwing a ball against the side of the house and finding a functioning automobile horn to honk.

Caldwell seems to be making a statement about those who have been left behind by industrialization and capitalism, as even those who are able to put in a crop can’t win: “A bale to the acre was the goal of every cotton farmer around Fuller; but the boll weevil and hard summer rains generally cut the crop in half.  And on the other hand, if it was a good year for the raising of cotton, the price would probably drop lower than it had before.  Not many men felt like working all year for six-or seven-cent cotton in the fall” (174).  Jeeter Lester is worse off than those, though, as he hasn’t planted a crop in several years, as all possible sources of credit have dried up.  The only possibility left for the Lesters is the county poor-farm—or, as the novel ends, death by fire.  Often, Jeeter refuses to leave for better economic prospects, however, because he claims that the land is in his blood.  Even then, however, the surviving son, Dude, seems to be haunted by the dead Jeeter, as he notes at the novel’s end that he thinks he might see about putting in a cotton crop, like his dad always wanted to.  The novel ends on this sense of absolute futility.

Nevertheless, what’ s most interesting to me are the presentation of female ugliness and sexuality in the novel.  Both Ellie Mae and Sister Bessie Rose are women whose faces are grotesque: Ellie Mae’s cleft lip is such that her “upper lip had an opening a quarter of an inch wide that divided one side of her mouth into unequal parts; the slit came to an abrupt end almost under her left nostril.  The upper gum was low, and because her gums were always fiery red, the opening in her lip made her look as if her mouth were bleeding profusely” (21).  Sister Bessie May, the preaching woman, is in fact “much better-looking than most women in the sand hills, except for her nose.  Bessie’s nose had failed to develop properly.  There was no bone in it, and there was no top to it.  The nostrils were exposed, and Dude had once said that when he looked at her nose it was like looking down the end of a double-barrel shotgun” (45).  Both of them are hypersexual—Ellie Mae doesn’t seem to talk, but only dawdles behind chinaberry trees, emerging to jump on men such as Lov with an “excited, feline agility” (34); Sister Bessie can’t keep her hands off of Dude when kneeling to pray with him, and the two of them shortly end up embracing and rubbing against each other (51).  Further, in the hotel scene—a scene so absurd as to echo a Restoration play—Sister Bessie is taken to several different rooms throughout the night, all of which have occupied beds (and it’s implied that she engaged in sexual activity throughout the night in these different occupied rooms).  

There’s a Faulknerian comparison of women to cows in the novel, as Lov’s complaint that his wife Pearl—the pretty Lester daughter, whom Jeeter approved marrying Lov at the age of twelve—as it’s considered as unnatural for a woman to reject male sexuality in the same way that Lester’s cow was worthless once it “wouldn’t take no freshening” (17).  In refusing to sleep in the same bed as Lov, Pearl is frequently characterized as “queer.”  (She’s also Ada’s daughter by someone other than Jeeter; all that’s known is that her father was that he was “from Carolina and on his way to Texas” (31)).  So, while a properly natural woman responds to a man’s advances, it’s only a monstrous woman who expresses or acts on her own sexual desires, as we see with Sister Bessie and Ellie Mae.  

This insistence on the “natural” is related to the role that God is understood to play in the novel’s deprivation.   Jeeter’s concept of the unshakeable divine plan for the farmer is reminiscent of Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying, such as when he explains that, “When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man” (36).  Thus, anything that doesn’t work for Jeeter can be blamed on divine plan.  Bessie, on the other hand, represents an interestingly active interpretation of the divine.  Not only does God’s plan reveal itself to her to align nicely with her own desires—such as her desire to marry Dude—but she seems to consider God as finite, or having limited abilities.  When, for example, Jeeter asks her to pray for Pearl, she suggests that it might be more successful if she was to talk to Pearl herself, as “I expect I know more about what to tell her than He does, because I been a married woman up to the past summer….I expect I know all about it.  God wouldn’t know what to tell her” (48). Religion, like mules and guano (and women), is simply another resource available to those on Tobacco Road, to be used or blamed according to the individual’s ability and predilection.

Dorothy Allison--Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

This novel tells the story of Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright, a young girl in South Carolina who grows up the bastard child of Anney Boatwright.  The Boatwrights are not the deserving poor which Allison writes elsewhere are romanticized in stories of the South; rather, they are more aligned with the Slatterys in Gone with the Wind, the “trash down on the mud-stained cabins, fighting with the darkies and stealing ungratefully from our betters, stupid, coarse, born to shame and death” (206).  Elsewhere, Allison explains that she wrote the novel “because, ultimately, the way to claim my family’s pride and tragedy, and the embattled sexuality I had fashioned on a base of violence and abuse” (“A Matter of Class”).  In this novel, Bone grows up amid dire poverty, deprivation, and violence.  Molested and beaten savagely by her stepfather, Bone survives with the help of her extended family of aunts and uncles who are similarly trapped by poverty and violence.

There are no easy answers in this novel.  People are trapped by decisions they were too young to realize they were making when they made them, whether by having children at 15 or by petty theft even earlier.  Anney can’t stay away from her husband, Glenn, even after seeing him rape her 13-year-old daughter.  Bone’s beloved Uncle Earl is a womanizer who can’t stay out of jail.  Still, there’s a fierce sense of familial solidarity which is (to me, at least) uniquely southern, as the way in which these characters claim their Boatwright identity seems to be their most fundamental sense of personal identification.

Reading this for a Queer South class, there’s certainly plenty to be said about sexuality and sexual identity in the novel.  In “A Matter of Class,” Dorothy Allison is quite specific about her own use of the word “queer” in describing her own sexual identity:

I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian.  Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply  that I am not only lesbian but a transgressive lesbian-femme, masochistic, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed….My sexual identity is intimately constructed by my class and regional background, and much of the hatred directed at my sexual preference is class hatred—however much people, feminists in particular, like to pretend this is not a factor.

Allison does not shy away from troubling sexuality in Bastard: in addition to the scenes of molestation and rape, Bone’s emergent sexuality is one in her sexual fantasies usually incorporate violence and danger, and at times she fantasizes about being watched while Daddy Glen is beating her.  It is this frankness, however, which I think gives the novel its strength.  While the novel’s ending is hopeful to a certain extent—Bone lives with her Aunt Raylene, escaping the violence and danger of Daddy Glenn’s house—it’s certainly not an overly optimistic one. 

For my own research purposes, there are many places in the novel in which ugliness appears.  Boatwright family appearance is itself a physical marker, one of tragedy is recorded on the body.  After Anney’s husband Lyle dies, her sister Ruth notes that, “Nothing will ever hit you this hard….Now you look like a Boatwright….Now you got the look.  You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get” (8).  Bone herself identifies as ugly: “No part of me was that worshipful, dreamy-eyed storybook girlchild, no part of me was beautiful” (208).  To Bone, her ugliness is a marker of her unwanted state: “Love would make me beautiful; a father’s love would purify my heart, turn my bitter soul sweet, and lighten my Cherokee eyes” (209).  Bone sees her own inner rage and bitterness as written on her body, a vicious cycle in which she’s hated for her ugliness, a hatred which in turn feeds her own inner rage and keeps her angry eyes dark.

Even more fascinating to me is the story of Shannon Pearl which is embedded in the novel, a story which I’ve frequently seen anthologized as a stand-alone story.  Shannon Pearl is the almost albino-looking child of parents deeply involved in evangelical Christianity, as her mother manages a Christian bookstore and sews costumes for gospel singers, while her father books acts on the gospel music circuit.  Shannon’s ugliness is a threatening one which people find it difficult to turn away from; Bone compares her need to “hang around what Granny called ‘that strange and ugly child’” to a compulsion to pick at scabs (156).  In one description, Bone sees Shannon, “Looking back at me from between her mother’s legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction” (155)—a description which to me seems to posit Shannon as a monstrous vagina dentata creature, an incarnation of the monstrous feminine. 

Even more importantly, Shannon is just as ugly on the inside.  Bone notes, “I had the idea that she was so ugly on the outside, it was only reasonable that Shannon would turn out to be saintlike when you got to know her,” and explains that such a characterization is what would happen in storybooks (157).  However, Shannon is angry and mean, getting drunk at gospel shows and calling Bone out on her poverty and dependence.  Shannon’s death is just as monstrous as her appearance while alive: at a barbeque, she plays with lighter fluid and is almost immediately turned to ashes, as “all around her skull her fine hair stood up in a crown of burning glory” (201).  The story of Shannon Pearl is a fascinating amalgamation of the monstrous feminine and the monstrous Christian, obsession, love and disgust.  In some way, it connects female ugliness with devotion and religion, and her death in somewhat seems to illuminate Bone’s earlier description of religious devotion: “This was what the gospel was meant to do—make you hate yourself and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified” (136).  Shannon’s life and death seems to personify the combination of shame and glory.

Eudora Welty--Curtain of Green (1941)

Last spring, I did my class presentation in Southern Lit on Welty and Curtain of Green, her 1941 short story collection.  I also did my final paper on her.  So, rather than try to write a short summary, after the jump I'm posting my notes on Welty and Curtain of Green, as well as the text of the paper I wrote (which I'm working on revising in order to try to get it published.

Kaye Gibbons--Ellen Foster (1987)

In her stunning debut novel, Gibbons creates the character of Ellen, who tells her own story of survival, escape, and courage.  Told in the first person primarily through flashback from the vantage point of her life in the “Foster” home with her “new mama,” she recounts her mother’s suicide and her father’s abuse and alcoholism.  Shuttled from her dangerous home to a brief respite with her art teacher, her dying grandmother’s home, her mean aunt’s, and finally to a home in which she’s finally safe, Ellen’s voice is so moving for its combination of honesty and hopefulness, even in the midst of death and abuse.

A primary theme of the novel is the idea of family, as Ellen continues to imagine what the word means.  She plays “catalog” by herself, picking out pictures of the things she imagines are needed to complete a real family, from cute babies to camping equipment.  She imagines coming up with a shopping list that she could take to a store “if they made such a store and say to the man behind the counter give me this and this and this. And he would hand you back a home” (94).  While she lives with her father, the closest to family she experiences is with her “colored” friend Starletta and her parents, who pick cotton for a living.  Though originally Ellen believes herself to be superior to them because of her whiteness, by the end of the novel she realizes that this attitude to have been a complete mistake, a realization which leads her to feel even more gratitude for Starletta’s friendship. 

Ellen’s coping mechanisms throughout the trauma that has pervaded her young life are astonishing, hilarious, and heartbreaking. After her terribly mean grandmother dies, she arranges all of the artificial flowers in the house in a circle around her corpse in an attempt to decorate her enough to make her pleasing to Jesus.  Explaining why she enjoys telling herself the same stories repeatedly, she says, “You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you only started with one solitary season out of your life” (49).  Or when the school counselor expresses concern that she has started signing her name as “Ellen Foster” on her schoolwork, she explains, “That may not be the name God or my mama gave me but that is my name now.  Ellen Foster.  My old family wore the other name out and I figured I would take the name of my new family.  That one is fresh.  Foster” (88).  Ellen is quite frank about her struggling and suffering, but she is equally determined to survive.