Female Gothic fiction, grotesque realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison revises the Southern Gothic.

Female Gothic fiction, grotesque realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison revises the Southern Gothic. IN A 1994 INTERVIEW, CAROLYN E. MEGAN ASKED DOROTHY ALLISON,"What tradition do you see yourself as fitting into?" WhenAllison responded, "I belong to the tradition of iconoclastic,queer, southern writer," Megan followed with a question that hasgenerated essays and essay collections, books and multi-volume series,individual lectures and entire academic conferences: "How would youdefine the southern tradition of writing?" Allison's responsewas both brief and provocative: "It's a lyrical tradition.Language. Iconoclastic, outrageous as hell, leveled with humor. Yankeesdo it, but Southerners do it more. It's the grotesque." Askedto identify her "role models in the southern tradition,"Allison responded, "On good days I claim myself in the sametradition as Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, TennesseeWilliams" ("Moving" 81). With her definition of the"Southern tradition" as "the grotesque" and heridentification of literary forebears (particularly O'Connor andWilliams), Allison associates herself and her writing with the complexcategory of the Southern Gothic. While the Gothic as a literary form is typically understood to havebegun in eighteenth-century England with Horace Walpole'ssupernatural tale of usurpation and retribution, The Castle of Otranto(1764), by the end of that century, the enormously popular novels of AnnRadcliffe had done much to establish a non-supernatural form of Gothicfiction, one that depicts human beings, rendered grotesque by theirextreme and incongruous passions and obsessions, as the ultimate sourceof horror. The first American Gothic novel, Charles BrockdenBrown's Wieland; Or, the Transformation: An American Tale (1798)owes more to Radcliffe than to Walpole in its focus on thepsychological, human origins of horror and its narration by a vulnerableyoung woman who is an intended victim of family-centered violence (acharacter type that Ellen Moers identifies as the Female GothicHeroine). Beginning in the nineteenth century with Edgar Allan Poe andhis Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (1840) and continuing intothe twentieth with the fiction of William Faulkner, FlanneryO'Connor, and Carson McCullers and the early work of Truman Capote,the literary grotesque functions as a distinctly American, frequentlySouthern, aspect of the Gothic. A significant element of the Gothic mode, the literarygrotesque--which includes incongruous, abnormal, "monstrous"characters, situations, and events--is sometimes discussed, especiallywithin the American literary tradition, as if it were a synonym forGothic or, conversely, as if it were something entirely different fromGothic. In 1935, Ellen Glasgow coined the term "the Southern Gothicschool" (360) to criticize what she saw as the "aimlessviolence" and the "Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones" brand ofprofessed realism practiced by "professional rebels againstgentility" in her contemporary American South; she mentionsspecifically "the fantastic nightmares of William Faulkner"(357). Intriguingly, Glasgow conflates the Gothic and the grotesque whenshe critiques Southern Gothic writers as the originators of"goblins" and "Southern monster[s]"(357)--grotesques by other names--and then attempts to differentiatebetween Gothic and grotesque in her wish that the writer(s) sheidentifies with the Southern Gothic school stop practicing a form ofliterary miscegenation: "The Gothic as Gothic, not aspseudo-realism, has an important place in our fiction" (360). TheGothic has from its inception included grotesque characters that,despite their mere humanity (or because of it), are able to generatereal horror. Glasgow's complaint is, in part, that the writers ofthe Southern Gothic school are writing Gothic literature (with itsfrequent inclusion of grotesques) and, in part, that they are notwriting "legitimate" Gothic literature (which would ostensiblyprovide readers with the comfort of knowing that the horror is notreal). In Love and Death in the American Novel(1960, 1966), LeslieFiedler highlights the realistic elements of American Gothic literature(a term he does not hesitate to embrace) and famously identifiesAmerican culture itself as essentially Gothic. In his preface to therevised (1966) edition, Fiedler observes, "Our most serious as wellas our funniest writers have found the gothic mode an apt one fortelling the truth about the quality of our life" (8). Gothic elements--thematic and stylistic characteristics thatsuggest the inescapability of the past and of inheritance (via bothblood and culture), the workings of obsession and monomania, and thenaivete or outright falsehood of foundational tenets of Americansociety: freedom from persecution based on difference, original equalityand opportunity, the possibility of self-determinism--are observableafter Charles Brockden Brown's Wielandin the fiction of NathanielHawthorne and Herman Melville. In nineteenth-century Southernliterature, Gothic elements appear in the works of Edgar Allan Poe,William Gilmore Simms, George Washington Cable, and (at the turn of thecentury) Charles Waddell Chesnutt. In the early to middle decades of thetwentieth century, the Southern Gothic, with its unflinching portrayalof human frailty, degradation, violence, and suffering, found its mosthaunting, consistently recognized and acclaimed embodiment in thefiction of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, authors knownfor their creation/representation of grotesques (characters likeFaulkner's Popeye and O'Connor's Misfit). In contemporary Southern literature, the high visibility andpopularity of Gothic texts that feature supernatural characters andevents (for example, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and CharlaineHarris's Southern Vampire series) have tended to obscure the legacyof the non-supernatural Southern Gothic; such obscurity makes a profileof Southern Gothic literature necessary. The Southern Gothic is fueledby the need to explain and/or understand foundational trauma, theviolation or loss of that which is essential to identity and survivalbut often irretrievable. Southern Gothic literature is characterized byobsessive preoccupations--with blood, family, and inheritance; racial,gender, and/or class identities; the Christian religion (typically, inits most "fundamentalist" forms); and home--and a compulsionto talk (or write) about these preoccupations. Dorothy Allison'shaunting, hyperrealistic, semi-autobiographical horror story of poverty,family violence, and sexual abuse, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), isfundamentally Southern Gothic. It explores the themes of family/blood asdestiny, the importance of place (both geographical and socio-economic),the inscription of identity through cultural models of gender, class,and ethnicity, and the powerful attraction to charismatic religiousexperience. It further demonstrates its Southern Gothic heritage throughthe characterization of the Boatwright family, Glen Waddell, and ShannonPearl, the grotesque young girl who self-immolates in front of thenarrator. Bastard Out of Carolina is even more remarkable as acontemporary Southern Gothic novel because of Allison's adaptationand transformation of the Female Gothic. In Chapter 5 of Literary Women (1976), Ellen Moers coins the term"Female Gothic" to describe Gothic literature written by womenprimarily in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and primarilyBritish. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining the complex categoryof "the Gothic," Moers simply states that "it has to dowith fear," that its "intent" is "to scare."She claims that in Gothic writings "fantasy predominates overreality.., and the supernatural over the natural" (90), but shebegins her discussion of Female Gothic texts in particular by mentioningAnn Radcliffe's fiction and continues by examining EmilyBronte's Wuthering Heights. She thus renders problematic some ofher own criteria for identifying a text as Gothic, for Radcliffe'snovels of the 1790s and Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) allultimately emphasize human cruelty, weakness, and/or passion as thereal, non-supernatural source of horror and demonstrate that humanbeings may have much more reason to fear themselves and one another thanany supernatural or imagined figure of evil. Despite her loose andproblematic working definition of Gothic, however, some of Moers'sobservations are still provocative. For example, she claims that the"auctorial intent" of the Gothic is to "get to the bodyitself" (90). Her focus on the body continues in her exploration ofFemale Gothic texts; her readings highlight anxieties and fears that shedirectly relates to female experience--from "the savagery ofgirlhood" (107) and the threat or experience of sexual violation,to pregnancy and childbirth--and how Gothic literature by womenexpresses those anxieties and fears. Moers's premise--thatwomen's bodies have everything to do with what happens to them,what frightens them, what frightens others about them--may striketwenty-first century readers as essentialist and overly simplistic, butLiterary Women began a critical conversation that continues, aconversation that explores the roles that sexuality and gender play inwhat we fear and what others may fear about us. In the 1980s and 1990s primarily, literary scholars and feministcritics did much to develop Moers's concept of Female Gothic. (1)The focus in the majority of these scholarly texts remains predominantlyon British novels of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, butthe overarching themes and styles identified within them are applicableto literature written after 1900 and beyond the borders of the BritishIsles. Particularly important to the identification and interpretationof the Female Gothic text (no matter when or where it originates) is theidentification of the Female Gothic heroine--typically, a motherless,vulnerable young woman facing the threat, if not the reality, ofconfinement and/or violation--and the recognition, masterfullyarticulated by Kate Ellis especially, of a central theme of FemaleGothic literature: the imprisonment and vulnerability of women withinstructures purportedly designed for or devoted to their safety,especially the family home. Within this domestic and supposedly sacredspace, women may live with the omnipresent threat of violence, if notthe reality of horrific abuse. That Female Gothic literature may represent Female Gothic realityis a possibility suggested in nineteenth-century fiction by Americanwomen writers like Augusta Evans Wilson, Kate Chopin, and CharlottePerkins Gilman, and the "possibility" becomes less tentative,the suggestion more insistent, in the twentieth century. In 1994, ElaineShowalter published Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change inAmerican Women "s Literature. In Chapter 7, Showalter directlyengages Moers's concept of Female Gothic and applies it to texts byAmerican women authors (for example, Gilman's "The YellowWallpaper" and Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going,Where Have You Been?"). Surveying the literary scene of the early1990s, Showalter unambiguously states, "Female Gothic looks moreand more like a realist mode" (144). Although she does not discussAllison's Bastard Out of Carolina (first published only two yearsbefore Sister's Choice), Showalter's comment is ideally suitedto describe Allison's breakthrough novel. In BastardOut ofCarolina, Allison re-writes the Female Gothic--from the perspective of atwentieth-century, "white trash" Southern girl. The novel is narrated by Ruth Anne (Bone) Boatwright, acontemporary version of the original, eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryFemale Gothic heroine. She is young and vulnerable; the novel ends whenshe is a few weeks shy of her thirteenth birthday. She has been raped byher stepfather, whom she is made to call Daddy Glen, and abandoned byher mother, Anney, who has left her and (re)joined her husband,Bone's rapist. Bone leans against Raylene, the aunt who, inAnney's absence, performs the role of nurturing mother, and"the night close[s] in around [them]" (Bastard 309). Beforethe final scene fades to black, however, Bone thinks empathetically ofher mother, identifies with her, reaches toward understanding andconnection. She knows that she is the daughter of a mother who was alsoyoung and vulnerable. In fact, Bone's narrative suggests that thisvulnerability may very well be inherited, passed from mother todaughter, a cultural reality of trans-generational female suffering thatcalls into question, as the Gothic so frequently does, the optimisticrhetoric of self-determinism. Bone's mother did not, like themothers of earlier Gothic heroines, die and leave her child vulnerable;she lived in a way that helped make her so. Bone's mother, Anney, was fourteen and unmarried when shebecame pregnant, fifteen and unconscious when she gave birth to Bone.Bone begins her narrative with that story: Anney, pregnant, flyingthrough a windshield as a result of a car accident (caused, Bone issure, by her Uncle Travis, who was driving drunk). Anney descends into acoma and thus is not consciously "present" when Bone is born.Anney's lack of consciousness during delivery of her first childprefigures her blindness (originally, possibly authentic but latercertainly willed) to Bone's abuse by the man she (Anney) married,ironically, because she thought he would "make a good daddy"(13). Unable to name her baby at birth, Anney could not circumvent thelegal recording of that child's illegitimacy; determined to stopothers from calling her child hateful names ("bastard,""trash," "No-good, lazy, shiftless" [3]), Anneyfailed to give her daughter any name at all. Bone's grandmother andaunt gave her the name Ruth Anne. Aunt Ruth, worn out in part byincessant child-bearing, wastes away and dies before the end of thenovel; Anne(y), Bone's mother, leaves her child but stays with theman who has devastated her and her children's lives. Vincent Kingnotes that the name Ruth "calls to mind the Biblical story of Ruthand Naomi," "a moving story of the mother/daughter bond ...[the] very bond which breaks down in Bastard," and observes that"the name Ruth ... is an ironic commentary on the relationshipbetween Bone and her mother" (127). King's observation andconnection (of Allison's narrative to the Biblical story of Ruth)is rendered more provocative by the fact that even though Anney leavesBone, Bone (Ruth Anne) stays loyal to her mother, with whom she attemptsto empathize and with whom she directly identifies even after Anney hasleft her. Bone's very name is a testimony to a dark, Female Gothiclegacy; from her birth, she seems destined to live, and die, as aBoatwright woman--a woman "born to mother, nurse, and clean upafter the men" (23). In a similar vein, King writes that"Bone, like Ruth and Naomi, lives in la] society where one's'name' is determined by, and dependent upon, men" (127).The presiding matriarch of the family, Bone's maternal grandmother,had wanted to name Bone after herself and a different one of herdaughters, Bone's Aunt Raylene, with whom Bone is living andrecovering at the end of the novel. Raylene is a non-conventional andgenerous-hearted woman, a lesbian, and a Boatwright woman who hasescaped the world of patriarchal violence. But it is important toremember that the name by which everyone knows the narrator, and bywhich she knows herself, is not Ruth; it is Bone, not a proper name atall but a thing, "a something to be possessed, broken, or thrown tothe dogs," as King observes (127). Her nickname originated withEarle, the most charismatic and articulate of the Boatwright uncles whomBone "worshiped" (22), the matchmaker who brought Anney andGlen Waddell together, the original object of Glen's infatuation:"More than anything in the world, Glen Waddell wanted EarleBoatwright to like him" (12). Marriage to Anney is originally a wayfor Glen to be related to Earle Boatwright, a way to access what Glensees as a form of potent masculinity and to strike out against hisfather and his brothers, the men whose success makes him feel inferior:"He would have her, he told himself.... marry the whole Boatwrightlegend, shame his daddy and shock his brothers" (13). When Earlefirst sees Baby Ruth Anne, he announces that she is "no bigger thana knucklebone" (2), an odd and disturbing comparison when taken inthe context of Earle's propensity for bare-knuckled brawling. Earlesees a newborn baby girl, his baby sister's first child, and whathe remarks upon is her smallness, which he measures against the size ofhis own hands. In an eerie parallel, Bone later comments aboutGlen's decidedly grotesque hands: "On his slender, small-bonedframe, they were startling, incongruous, constantly in motion, and theonly evidence of just how strong he was" (35). Virtually from themoment he marries Anney, but beginning in earnest the night his andAnney's first and only baby (Glen Junior) is stillborn, thoseenormous hands seem always to be reaching for Bone. Glen intentionallymoves his family further and further from the Boatwrights, especiallythe Boatwright women and their store of family legends. Sensing thatidentity is formed by blood and narrative, Glen strives to insertdistance between Bone and her maternal aunts and grandmother and to sethimself up as the primary source of Bone's identity, the ultimatesource of authority: "'I'll tell you who you are,'he said [to Bone]. 'You're mine now, an't justBoatwrights'" (52). One of the many heartbreaking realitiespresented by this all-too-realistic Female Gothic novel is the extent towhich women, accepting imprisonment and violence as normal or even"natural," may accept and participate in their ownimprisonment and violation. Anney's desire to give her children a home and a family (i.e.,one with a father in it to bestow legitimacy) is part of what fuels herdecision to marry Glen Waddell, as is her lack of alternative models ofwomanhood. Even her bold, sharp-tongued mother and elder sisters arewomen who, embodying stereotypical traits of "white trash"womanhood, married and clung to men who embodied stereotypes of"white trash" manhood. As Randall Kenan writes in his reviewof the novel, "Hence the danger. The stereotype of poor whitetrash: liquored-up, malevolent, unemployed, undereducated,country-music-listening, oversexed, foul-tempered men; andlong-suffering, quickly aging, overly fertile, too-young-marrying,hard-headed women" (815). Kenan concedes that "all stereotypesderive from some root of truth," but continues by asserting that,somehow, the Boatwrights simply lack authenticity (or "piss andvinegar," as he puts it), that they fail to measure up to thepeople "one truly encounters among farmers, mechanics, factoryworkers and waitresses who populate the Carolinas" (815). Whilesome readers might find Allison's characters"stereotypical," Anney's marriage to Glen, her love forhim, her seeming inability to leave him even after he commits the mostmonstrous of acts are all familiar, realistic, and believable facts oflife--especially for women in families and cultures that presentromantic/sexual love between a woman and a man as primary, the"two-parent" (father-as-head) family as superior (andGod-ordained), and woman as divinely predestined to prioritize, nurture,and submit to man. In "Ellipsis, Ritual, and 'Real Time': Rethinkingthe Rape Complex in Southern Novels," an incisive reading ofAllison's (re)presentation of rape as a real event, a traumaexperienced in real time by real girls and women, Laura S. Pattersonrightly observes that Glen's rape of Bone "represents rageagainst a matriarchal community" (41). Glen is always the mostdangerous when he feels his masculinity, his power or authority as amale, threatened or even questioned. Although Anney clearly loves anddraws strength from her mother, her sisters, and her two young daughters(Bone and her younger sister, Reese), she cannot see her relationshipswith them as primary. As Megan, interviewing Allison, comments,"The women in Bastard don't seem to recognize that it is theirlove for the other women that carries them through." Allison'sresponse to Megan's comment is that this blindness, especially onAnney's part, is what makes the book "essentially atragedy": "what [Anney's] most afraid of is losing thisfamily she's held together [with Glen]. That's not what sheshould be afraid of; she loses her family when she loses her daughter.She doesn't know enough to be really afraid of that" (Allison,"Moving" 77). The "matriarchal community" of the Boatwright womenincludes two of Anney's sisters who do not live with the rest ofthe family in the immediate environment of Greenville, South Carolina.The Eustis aunts, Marvella and Maybelle, practice ritualistic"women's magic" (44), "root magic," as Anneycalls it rather dismissively (105). For Anney and Glen's wedding,they prepare a "love knot" comprised of Marvella's hairand the blood from rabbits' ears cut under a new moon. They set therabbits free, tear up already-rooted green beans and bury honeycomb in apiece of lace tablecloth in their garden; they then instruct Anney toplace the love knot under the new bed she and Glen will share. Anney,offended by the smell (and worried even more that it would bother Glen),places the love knot in a flower pot in the utility room (41-42).Immediately before a scene in which Bone remembers one of her mostvicious beatings when she was ten and Glen had lost another job, shetells of finding the remains of the love knot: "Mice had picked theribbon apart from the hair, and bugs had carried off most of the herbsand blood"; when Anney tries to pick it up, the love knot falls todust (104). The same week Marvella and Maybelle have disturbing dreamsand find that a dog has dug up the honeycomb they planted years ago andtorn through the lace (105). The vignette about the Eustis aunts andtheir "women's magic" adds yet another Gothic element toBone's narration, but it does something more as well. Bone mentionsthe destruction of the love knot and the honeycomb--both of which aremeant, by the Eustis aunts, to invoke fertility and domestic"sweetness"/harmony--as she records Glen's consciousattempts to move "his" family further from the Boatwrights(especially the female Boatwrights), the escalation of his violenceagainst her, and Anney's submission to a narrative of femaleculpability (after the beating, she asks Bone, "Baby, what did youdo? What did you do?" [107]). This destruction is clearly more thana mystical manifestation of the reality of domestic turmoil.Anney's hesitance to believe in or value her sisters'"magic" is part of why it cannot "work," just as herhesitance--perhaps her inability--to believe in and value herself andher daughter more than a man who understands masculinity as theassertion of dominance over women participates in the ultimate act ofviolation Bone experiences before she enters her teens. Glen's brutal sexual penetration of Bone is portrayed as areal, physical, bloody event; its delay until near the end of the novelonly intensifies its devastating power. It follows the sexualmolestation that Glen inflicts on Bone the night that Glen lunior isstillborn. It also follows other scenes of violence anddevastation--from the bizarre, accidental death (in "devil'srain" [7]) of Lyle Parsons, the gentle "manchild" (6) whowas Anney's first husband, Reese's father, and the swiftlywithdrawn possibility of a loving father for Bone; to the death by fireof Bone's childhood friend, the grotesque and tragic Shannon Pearl;to Aunt Alma's violent descent into madness upon the death of herbaby followed by her cruel rejection by her husband. Glen's final,sexually and emotionally brutal attack on Bone is depicted in suchunflinching, realistic detail, however, that it "scares," it"gets to the body" of the reader in a way that the otherscenes do not, in a way that Moers probably did not have in mind whenshe wrote those early descriptions of the function of Gothic literaturebut that Allison, as a Southern writer, explicitly owns as intentional.As she said recently regarding the impact her writing (specificallyBastard Out of Carolina) has on readers, "I'm an Americannovelist, a Southern American novelist. I'm not a nice person. Iwant to scare you; I want to rip you up." The half-in-jest smile,the charm with which she delivered those lines, did nothing to undercuttheir seriousness; for Dorothy Allison clearly is serious about the roleof literature in the process of individual and cultural enlightenment (aword that she acknowledges is often synonymous with painful experienceand/or awakening to horrifying truths) ("On Two or ThreeThings"). Allison's realistic portrayal of Bone's violation and itsaftermath makes visible the horrific reality of child molestation andrape in a culture ostensibly committed to the nurturance and protectionof its children; it also highlights the devastating choices women mayfeel forced to make. Glen's final physical and verbal assaultagainst Bone is followed by Anney's abandonment of her child. WhenAnney returns briefly at the end of the novel, she does so to tell Bonethat she loves her and to give her a "corrected" birthcertificate, one with the hateful word ILLEGITIMATE expunged.Ironically, Anney's "gift" is a blank, the absence of aword. Patterson reads Anney's gift as both liberating andempowering: "Anney memorializes Bone's escape from patriarchalviolence and her own escape from the South when she gives Bone atangible identity outside the realm of the patriarchy: a birthcertificate that bears neither the name of the father nor the stamp'illegitimate'" (57). But Allison's characterizationof both Bone and Anney at the end of the novel does not seem to suggestthat either one of them has escaped their familial and culturalinheritance of patriarchal violence. Anney has left her child and isliving with that child's rapist; she has gone, Bone suspects, toCalifornia or Florida with him (308). Allison has said that Anney'schoice--to leave Bone with Raylene and to go away withGlen--"saved" Bone ("On Two or Three Things"), andquite possibly it did, for it placed Bone out of the range ofGlen's sadism and rage. But did Anney make the choice consciouslyand for that reason? Allison said that she did, that she (Allison) hadthat explanation for Anney's actions in her mind when she wrote thebook (Personal). There is some comfort in this extra-textualexplanation, for it allows readers to see Anney as something other thanthe "complicit and betraying" "collusive mother" whohas chosen her child's abuser over the child herself (Bouson 116),or as something other than a woman so emotionally battered by an abuserthat she stays with him simply out of fear of what would happen to herif she did not. Given the point of view of the novel, however, readersare not privy to Anney's tortured thought processes; they see Anneyonly through the eyes of her brutalized child. Attempting to explain her choices (to stay with Glen, to return tohim time and time again), Anney says to Bone, "I just loved him soI couldn't see him that way. I couldn't believe. Icouldn't imagine" (306). Anney's words suggest inability(she "couldn't see," "couldn't believe,""couldn't imagine") rather than active choice. She soundsvery much as Bone describes her during this devastating moment betweenmother and daughter: "Bones seemed to have moved, flesh fallenaway, and lines deepened into gullies, while shadows darkened to streaksof midnight" (306). Anney sounds broken, beaten, and old, and shelooks like a decaying corpse. Supernatural monsters are not required forGothic fiction or for Gothic reality; human predators can do suchviolence that their victims are, essentially, the walking dead.Bone's reaction to Anney's gift of a blank space on a piece ofpaper further suggests entrapment more than escape. She utters wordsthat, on the surface, suggest a remarkably mature, stable, and positiveself-identity: "I was who I was going to be, someone like her[Raylene], like Mama, a Boatwright woman" (309). But thisaffirmation, coming at the end of a story filled with suffering andpowerlessness, suggests fatalism as much as pride and autonomy. Afterall, as Bone notes very early in the narrative, when she listened to hergranny talk about family history, she realized that "Everythingseemed to come back to grief and blood" (26). When Bone says thatshe "is who [she] was going to be," she suggests suffering andsubjugation as familial obligation and female destiny. Like virtually all Gothic characters, from those created in theeighteenth century by Radcliffe to those described in the twentiethcentury by Faulkner, Bone's identity and (from her perspective atleast) her destiny are forged by blood and history, but they are alsoformed by place, by "home" in a larger sense. Bone grows uppoor in mid-twentieth-century Greenville, South Carolina, a place thatshe says was, in 1955, "the most beautiful place in the world"(17). Writing of the same place and time in her memoir/performancepiece, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Allison describes"home" in more Gothic terms; she emphasizes the connectionbetween fertility and decay, attraction and repulsion: "Everythingwas ripe, everything was rotting.... That country was beautiful, I swearto you, the most beautiful place I've ever been. Beautiful andterrible. It is the country of my dreams and the country of mynightmares" (6-7). Unlike the series of rental houses into and outof which Bone's stepfather moves the family throughout herchildhood, her larger home is a complex mix of geography, socioeconomiccondition, and emotional associations. Class and ethnicity are provocatively combined in Bastard Out ofCarolina by Allison's claiming of the "poor white trash"stereotype. As Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz point out in White Trash:Race and Class in America, historically and sociologically, "whitetrash" has functioned as a "classist slur" and a"racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, adysgenic race unto themselves" (2). David Reynolds similarlydescribes a "genetic theory that white trash were a biologicallyinferior group of late arrivals," a theory discernible in thewritings of middle- and upper-class white Americans virtually from thefounding of the nation. Further, he observes, This blood-line theory assuages any guilt over economic inequality. American society is not at fault if these low-others are genetically predisposed to be white trash. This idea that white trash is a quasi-ethnic group also solves the problem of the poor-white oxymoron: it is incongruous to be white in America ... and yet be unable to achieve the success guaranteed by the national birthright. (359-60) The Boatwrights are "incongruous" (one of the possiblesynonyms for grotesque) in their intergenerational poverty. As JenniferCampbell comments in the first paragraph of "Teaching Glass: APedagogy and Politics for Working-Class Writing," "In thisnation whose central myth was and remains the rise of the individualever-upwards through social and financial strata that, cloud-like,apparently fade away as they are passed through, 'class'remains the unspoken category" (116). Gothic texts, however,consistently engage "the unspoken" and drag into the light thegrotesque truths about the most romanticized of institutions andsocieties; in Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison speaks the unspeakableand exposes the unthinkable: that the family may be the site of violent,"unnatural" acts; that a society founded on the ideals offreedom and opportunity may offer little of either to some Americans;that those who enjoy these luxuries (of freedom and opportunity) mayhave attained them through socially-sanctioned acts of imprisonment andtheft. Timothy Dow Adams remarks that Allison's family, upon whom shebased her fictional Boatwrights, "were also outside of the falselyromanticized view 'poor but proud' because within the generalcategory of poor, they were 'the bad poor'" (88), proneto alcoholism, violence, and destruction. Allison's vivid andrealistic portrayal of the Boatwright family suggests a possibility thatthe "good poor" (who would wish to distance themselves from"trash") and middle- and upper-class Americans might choose toignore: that the lives of the "bad poor" and the despair andrage that fuel and characterize those lives might be the legitimateoffspring of cultural history and social reality. Through Bone'sarticulate and heart-wrenching story, which is also (as she insists atthe very end of her narrative) the story of her mother(s), Allisonoffers this revelation: that the "bad poor" live as they donot because they freely choose to do so but because they feel they havelittle choice at all. Their rage and despair suggests an exquisiteawareness of poverty and powerlessness as the legacy of the potentiallychimerical nature of the American Dream for some Americans. In BastardOut of Carolina, brief references to Bone's Cherokeegreat-great-grandfather further emphasize the Boatwrights as thedisenfranchised, the descendants of ancestors from whom land, language,and home were stripped, the victims of cultural rape and the inheritorsof socially sanctioned violence and loss. Allison presents a young girl,Bone, as the especial inheritor of this legacy. Aunt Alma speaks ofBone's "black Indian eyes" (25); Granny says that, of thecurrent Boatwrights, only Bone "got that blue-black hair"(27). Bone's empathetic response to those who are victimized andostracized because of ethnicity is demonstrated in two scenes in whichshe reacts passionately to racial prejudice. The event that destroys thecomplex friendship between Bone and Shannon Pearl (the only personoutside of Bone's family to whom she develops an intense, emotionalattachment) is racially charged. Standing in a cemetery, Bone andShannon hear gospel singing in the distance. Bone's response ismore than appreciative; she is in awe of the authentic beauty and power,"the dark night terror and determination of real gospel" (169)coming from what Shannon informs her is a "churchfur' of"niggers": "The way Shannon said 'nigger' toreat me, the tone pitched exactly like the echoing sound of Aunt Madeline[Glen's sister-in-law] sneering 'trash' when she thoughtI wasn't close enough to hear" (170). As the tension betweenthe girls escalates, Shannon says, "You nothing but trash. Yourmama's trash, and your grandma, and your whole dirty family"(171). Bone's fury manifests itself physically and verbally; sheattacks Shannon with her fists and with words she knows will cut to thequick, the very words against which Bone has tried to defend Shannon inthe past: "You ugly thing.... You monster" (171). An earlier,more lyrical scene in which Bone describes a dark face in a window as ifshe were looking at her own face in a mirror also underscoresBone's identification with ethnic Otherness: I slit my eyes against the bright light. The face in the window narrowed its eyes. I couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl--a very pretty boy or a very fierce girl for sure. The cheekbones were as high as mine, the eyes large and delicate with long lashes, while the mouth was small, the lips puffy as if bee-stung, but not wide. The chocolate skin was so smooth, so polished, the pores invisible. I put my fingers up to my cheeks, looked over at Grey [a cousin] and then back down. Grey's cheeks were pitted with blackheads and flushed with sunburn. I never thought about it before, but he was almost ugly. (84) Intriguingly, gender momentarily bows to race in importance as Bonefocuses on the similarities between herself and the young AfricanAmerican child in the window--and on the beauty of that child compared,ironically, to an otherwise beloved member of her own family. This sceneoccurs when Aunt Alma briefly leaves philandering Uncle Wade and earnsDaddy Glen's "undying contempt" not only because she hasdared to leave her husband but because she took "his" childrenwith her into an apartment building tenanted by "niggers"(83). Bone's recognition of the beauty of the child in the window(and, briefly perhaps, even of the child in the mirror) is married to anawareness of the "ugliness" of her own family. Pride and shame are perversely mixed in this novel, as they oftenare in the lived experience of stigmatized individuals and groups. AsBouson points out, "the stubborn 'pride' and the defiantshamelessness of poor whites like the Boatwrights function to covertheir social shame--their feelings of social powerlessness andinferiority" (107). In an early scene of physical and emotionalfamily intimacy, Bone's granny expresses her love for hergrandchildren and explicitly owns them as hers by repeatedly callingthem "ugly" (18-21). Speaking directly to five-year-old Bone,Granny calls her "Pretty ugly": "Granny whispered aboveme, her fingers sliding across the back of my head, untangling my hairand lifting it up off my neck. 'Almost pretty. Oh, you're aBoatwright all right, a Boatwright for sure'" (21). Grannyclaims "ugliness" as a birthright and turns it into a bizarreterm of endearment, a grotesque ritual inscribing the legitimacy of thegrotesque. The grotesque is implicit in Allison's portrayal of theBoatwrights and of Glen, but it is explicit in the character of ShannonPearl, the "ugly" albino girl whom Bone befriends, whom shefiercely loves and fiercely hates, and who, despite the two girls'physical dissimilarity (Bone is thin and dark, with black eyes and hair;Shannon is obese, with white skin, eyes, and hair), ultimately functionsnot only as "a visible sign of Bone's feelings of white trashugliness and shame-rage" (Bouson 113) but as Bone's Gothicdouble. Bone "recognize[s] Shannon Pearl immediately" when shesees her get on the schoolbus, that site of innumerable scenes ofadolescent abuse and horror, at the beginning of a school year (153).Bone had previously seen Shannon and her parents at revival tentmeetings. Shannon is large, myopic, and, intriguingly, exceptionallywhite: "Six inches shorter than me, Shannon had the white skin,white hair, and pale pink eyes of an albino, though her mama insistedShannon was no such thing" (155). Her father books acts for thegospel music circuit; her mama, Roseanne, manages a Christian bookstore,sews, embroiders, and lavishes affection on her "miraclechild" (155), adamantly refusing to see that child's pain orrage. Allison's choice of first name for Shannon's mother isnoteworthy, for Roseanne is the name Bone chooses for herself when,seeing "a contempt as old as the red dust hills" (67) in theeyes of a teacher at her new school, Bone decides to assume a newidentity. "Roseanne Carter" is not one of the rural poor, nota Boatwright who moves from one rented (or foreclosed upon) house toanother; she is from Atlanta, her family having only recently relocated.Bone's seemingly instinctive protectiveness of Shannon, the fiercelove she sometimes feels for her, is almost maternal. Bone recognizes inShannon a fellow enraged victim of social ostracism and is drawn to her:"My fascination with her felt more like the restlessness that mademe worry the scabs on my ankles. As disgusting as it seemed, Icouldn't put away the need to scratch my ankles or hang around whatGranny called 'that strange and ugly child'" (156).Shannon's grotesqueness depends on something more than mere"ugliness," however. Emphasizing her pale, thin skin throughwhich the blue veins are clearly visible, her baby-fine hair, and herpudgy body, Bone describes Shannon as if she were a monstrous infant,one whom only a mother could love. Watching Mrs. Pearl lavish affectionon the child she calls her "little angel," Bone witnesses ascene of (Female) Gothic horror: "Looking back at me from betweenher mother's legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunchedcreature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction." Mrs. Pearl maybe oblivious, but, at least occasionally, Bone wonders whether RoseannePearl gave birth to a monster. Immediately after this scene, Bonethinks, "There had to be something wrong with me" (155).Ultimately, Bone does, as she says, "recognize" Shannonimmediately; she recognizes her "ugliness" and hervulnerability, her hurt and her rage, because Bone lives the same sortof emotional reality. One of the few times that Bone's rage explodes into violentlanguage and action outside of her family environment is when a gospelmusic singer says to Shannon, "Child, you are the ugliest thing Ihave ever seen" (165). At times, even Bone finds Shannon repulsive;in fact, the reason both girls encounter the man in the purple shirt andsilver boots outside the tent where the gospel singing is taking placeis that Bone, nauseated by the backstage smell of whiskey and by thescent of Shannon's grotesquely baby-like hair, flees the tent tovomit, and Shannon follows her. Bone cannot witness Shannon's griefand humiliation and fail to act. Enraged, Bone unleashes a stream ofverbal abuse on the singer that would make Uncle Earle proud, but whenMrs. Pearl arrives, her response bespeaks either willed ignorance orblatant stupidity. If it is willed ignorance, it is not utterly unlikeAnney's failure or inability to see the truth of Glen's abuseof Bone. Roseanne Pearl strokes and pats her weeping child and speaks toher as if she were an infant crying for no reason ("Shannon, whatare you going on for?"); smiling ingratiatingly, almost flirting,Mrs. Pearl then tells the man who has driven her daughter to tears howshe (Mrs. Pearl) loves it when he sings (166). Bone sees the hate inShannon's face, recognizes it, and thinks, "If there was aGod, then there would be justice. If there was justice, then Shannon andI would make them all burn" (166). It is, however, Shannon Pearl who burns. Coming into thePearls' backyard, Bone witnesses Shannon's death, but Shannondoes not see the approach of her alienated but still protective friend.Isolated and alone in the midst of a family gathering where her owncousins taunt her, looking like "a sausage stuffed in a too-smallcasing" (199), Shannon pours lighter fluid on a barbeque grill andbursts into flames: she "didn't even scream. Her mouth waswide open, and she just breathed the flames in. Her glasses went opaque,her eyes vanished, and all around her skull her fine hair stood up in acrown of burning glory" (200-01). Nicholas Lakostik has argued thatShannon is "evil" and "demonic," that she "isnot someone for whom men should sacrifice, nor is she the most valuableof friends" (59). In fact, he argues, her death can be read"as an animal sacrifice to God--at the barbeque instead of thealtar"; for "Shannon is not one of God's children, andfrom what readers can gather about her personality in the story and herfiery death, she will not be spending eternity in heaven" (60).Thankfully, not everyone sees the "monstrous" Shannon asunworthy of heaven or of grief. Bone describes Shannon's death invivid detail, and the realism does as much to evoke sympathy as horror.The "crown of burning glory" suggests Christ-like sacrifice (apossibility that Lakostik mentions but dismisses), and Bone sincerelygrieves for her friend not just because of how she died but also becauseof how she lived. Despite the Pearls' fundamentalist Christianity,Shannon Pearl found little love (except from her mother) and littleunderstanding (except from Bone) in this world. Bone first caught a glimpse of Shannon at the tent revivals she(Bone) frequented, driven there by hunger and by need: "I wanted, Iwanted, I wanted something--Jesus or God or orange-blossom scent or darkchocolate terror in my throat. Something hurt me, ached in me"(151). Bone is especially drawn to the music of charismatic worship,music that she perceives as fueled by suffering and offering hope ofrelease from suffering. Her desire is to be a gospel singer, the kindthat brings people to tears and to Jesus. Bone's desire forreligious intensity is strong, and she begins to suspect that theSouthern Baptist faith is not powerful enough to satisfy it. Anney,realizing that Bone's next step may be Pentecostalism, has herbaptized at Bushy Creek Baptist Church; the immersion fails to give Bonewhat she wanted: "Whatever magic Jesus' grace promised, Ididn't feel it. I pushed up out of that dirty water, shivering,broke out in a sweat, and felt my fever rise" (152). Bone'squest for intense religious experience elicits a warning from Granny anda passionate reproof from Uncle Earle. Granny warns Bone not to take"that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out nowand then, but it an't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Runthrough you fast and leave you with a pain" (144). Uncle Earleclaims there is "no God and no hope in churches" (147), buthis impassioned protests betray him. Bone remarks, He talked about Jesus like a man dying for need of him, but too stubborn to sit down to the meal spread within reach. Earle talked the language of gospel music, with its rhythms and intensity. I heard in his drawled pronouncements the same thing I heard when I listened to the music, the desperation swelling rough raw voices.... The hunger, the lust, and the yearning were palpable. (148) Earle Boatwright's love-hate relationship with religion isremarkably similar to his attraction to, need for, and poisonousattitudes about women; in fact, according to Earle, both religion andwomen are vampires. Speaking of churches, Earle remarks, "They wantyou, oh yes, they want you. Till they get you.... It an't that youget religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry" (148).Speaking of his brother Beau's wife, Maggie (short for the moreBiblical Magdaline), Earle says she "is the trouble in Beau'slife. Little white-faced thing, white eyes, white-headed, bruises soonas the wind blows hard. Woman makes babies the way you make biscuits.All the time pregnant.... Woman has eaten Beau alive. Like some vampiresucking the juice out of him. You cut that girl open and you'd findBeau's blood pumping her heart" (128). Earle'spreoccupation with Maggie's whiteness continues the novel'sassociation between extreme whiteness and "monstrosity" (ref.Shannon Pearl), darkness and victimization (ref. Bone). His assignmentof blame to Maggie for the fact that she bruises easily is disturbing;in a family where domestic violence is the rule rather than theexception, Earle's comment suggests that the fault lies with thevictim, if she betrays the signs of abuse via visible bruises. Thecommentary about Maggie's fertility is especially puzzling; Earleseems to think that the "little white-faced thing" hasdescended succubus-like on her husband in the night and forced him toimpregnate her. Aunt Ruth (Earle's sister) brings him up short:"You making out like you think that's what's wrong withyour life, Earle Boatwright? Your woman eat the heart out of you? Themother of your daughters drive you to drink and day jobs and cursing onmy porch in the broad daylight?" Earle's response is honest,if nothing else: "'Yes, Ruth,' he whispered. 'Thebitch of it is, I do'" (129). Earle's Gothic vision of religion and women as vampires isrelated to his emphasis (also Gothic) on his father's blood asdetermining his identify and destiny. Earle reads his life asfore-ordained, a blood inheritance from his father, remarking on thefact that his father was called "'that Boatwright boy'till the day he died" and that he "Took better care of hisdogs than his wife or children...." "Thing is, I think all ofus [his sons], we're just like him," Earle adds (125). TheBoatwright "boys"' propensities for womanizing,alcoholism, fighting, and trouble with the law all come down, at leastfrom Earle's perspective, to blood. Their faults are not reallytheir own; the sins of their father have been visited upon them.Ironically, even Glen's most heinous "sins" are read byAnney as his father's fault: "Anybody can see how Glen gotbent, what his daddy's done to him.... All Glen really needs is toknow himself loved, to get out from under his daddy'smeanness" (132). Bastard Out of Carolina is fundamentally Southern Gothic in itsexploration of the theme of blood and place--family and home--as thematrix of identity and destiny. It also demonstrates its Southern Gothicheritage through its representation of grotesque characters, situations,and events, the intricately connected roles of ethnicity, class, andgender, and the power and influence of fundamentalist Christianity. Itre-vises this heritage through its adaptation of the Female Gothic modeto the realistic portrayal of living as one of the "bad poor"in the contemporary American South. In One or Two Things I Know forSure, Allison writes, "I know the use of fiction in a world of hardtruth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth" (3). BastardOut of Carolina, part autobiography and part fiction, unflinchinglyportrays that "harder piece of truth"--about the potentialhorrors and Gothic realities of life in the contemporary South,especially if one happens to be "poor white trash" and female. Works Cited Adams, Timothy Dow. "Telling Stories in Dorothy Allison'sTwo or Three Things I Know for Sure." Southern Literary Journal36.2 (2004): 82-99. Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Dutton, 1992. --. "Moving Toward Truth: An Interview with DorothyAllison." Carolyn E. Megan. Kenyon Review 16.4 (1994): 71-83. --. "On Two or Three Things I Know for Sure." Talk at theArkansas Literary Festival. Little Rock, 18 April 2009. --. Personal interview with author. 18 April 2009. --. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New York: Plume, 1996. Bouson, J. Brooks. "'You Nothing But Trash': WhiteTrash Shame in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina."Southern Literary Journal 34.1 (2001): 101-23. Campbell, Jennifer. "Teaching Class: A Pedagogy and Politicsfor Working-Class Writing." College Literature 23.2 (1996): 116-30. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night." A Feminist Studyof Nineteenth-Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and theSubversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Rev.ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. Fleenor, Juliann, ed. Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden, 1983. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: TheWoman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven:Yale UP, 1979. Glasgow, Ellen. "Heroes and Monsters." Saturday Review ofLiterature 4 (May 1935): 3-4. Rpt. in Deigning Southern Literature:Perspectives and Assessments, 1831-1952. Ed. John E. Bassett. Madison:Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997. 357-60. Kenan, Randall. "Sorrow's Child." Nation 255.22 (28Dec. 1992): 815-16. King, Vincent. "Hopeful Grief: The Prospect of a PostmodernistFeminism in Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina." SouthernLiterary Journal 33.1 (2000): 122-40. Lakostik, Nicholas. "A Crown of Conflicting Glory: BiblicalAllusions in Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina." Explicator66.1 (2007): 59-61. Moers, Ellen. "Female Gothic." Literary Women: The GreatWriters. 1976. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Patterson, Laura S. "Ellipsis, Ritual, and 'RealTime': Rethinking the Rape Complex in Southern Novels. MississippiQuarterly 54.1 (2000--2001): 37-58. Reynolds, David. "White Trash in Your Face: The LiteraryDescent of Dorothy Allison." Appalachian Journal 20.4 (1993):356-66. Showalter, Elaine. "American Female Gothic."Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women'sWriting. 1991. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. 127-44. Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re) Visions." Writing Women asReaders. Albany: U of New York P, 1993. Wray, Matt, and Annalee Newitz. "Introduction." WhiteTrash: Race and Class in America. Ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz. NewYork: Routledge, 1997. 1-12. PEGGY DUNN BAILEY Henderson State University (1) In 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar published theirgroundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic." The Woman Writer and theNineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. In Part 1, they explicitlymention "female Gothic" as Moers's concept/ category(83), but Gilbert and Gubar's entire text is permeated by Gothicimagery and diction and emphasizes the connection between women'swriting and women's experience to such an extent that it could, infact, have been appropriately subtitled "Female Gothic." Asthe years passed, scholars made more overt attempts to develop and applyMoers's concept. In 1983, Juliann Fleenor edited a collection ofessays entitled, appropriately enough, Female Gothic. In 1989, KateFerguson Ellis published her highly acclaimed The Contested Castle:Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Eugenia C.DeLamotte's Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study ofNineteenth-Century Gothic appeared in 1990 and Susan Wolstenholme'sGothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers in 1993. All of thesescholars owe something to Moers's original premise--that Gothicliterature may be gendered or, more specifically, that gender may be acrucial element involved in the generation, recognition, and receptionof Gothic literature.