Reconstructing Southern Women's Literature

A literary critic says it's more than sugar and honey

By SCOTT HELLER

"I don't write historically or anything," Eudora Welty once told an interviewer. "Most of the things that I write about can be translated into personal relationships." Welty's self-deprecating statement could stand in for the prevailing critical take on fiction by Southern women. In contrast to the sweep of a William Faulkner or a Robert Penn Warren, their works have long been considered more folksy than far-reaching.

Southern women writers, critics have argued, have two feet planted on the front porch.

Patricia Yaeger, a professor of English and women's studies at the University of Michigan, reads the work of Southern women quite differently. She finds a ferocity in the tradition that's been largely overlooked, and sometimes denied by the writers themselves.

Turning South after earlier work on "anti-patriarchal" women's writing, nationalism, and sexuality, Ms. Yaeger is among a bold new generation of critics shaking up Southern literary studies, a field notoriously resistant to change.

In her new Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (University of Chicago Press), the professor scrutinizes writers both firmly in the canon and those still knocking at the door, from Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston to Ellen Douglas, Lillian Smith, and Sarah E. Wright.

And she redraws the regional map, urging the inclusion of Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and other African-American novelists who write from the North but whose fiction is wrapped up in Southern culture.

Black or white, the writers she describes aren't especially nostalgic for a lost Southern past, especially when you read between the lines of their sometimes deceptively simple prose. They are struggling with a complicated Southern present, with stark racial divides that go unspoken or are made the stuff of epic tragedy in the writings of their male counterparts, most notably William Faulkner.

"The field of southern literary studies has been dominated by a huge Faulkner industry that both overshadows and tames the terms we use for reading southern women's fiction," writes Ms. Yaeger.

"If we are to see this fiction in all of its power," she adds, "we need to change the categories we use to think about southern literature."

Those categories have been firmly established over several generations, scholars say, thanks to the critics who sanctioned Southern literature as a field of study. They were influenced by a group of poets and critics who called themselves the Agrarians. In the famed 1930 manifesto I'll Take My Stand, the Agrarians defended a unique Southern culture against homogenizing industrialism.

Although the study of literature has undergone several revolutions since the Agrarians reigned, and the New Critical paradigm they advocated has fallen out of favor, methodologies like feminism and psychoanalysis have come slowly to this field. But a set of recent and ambitious studies, Dirt and Desire included, seem to usher in a decisively different era.

"We're making this field interesting again," says Michael Kreyling, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and the author of Inventing Southern Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 1998). His book is a broadside in the guise of a literary history, tracing who was left out of important anthologies. By portraying themselves as defenders of a tradition under siege, he argues, the anthologists ended up defining Southernness, and Southern literature, in conservative terms.

Studying writers left out of the traditional Southern canon is one of the goals of Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), by Richard Gray, a professor of literature at the University of Essex, in England. He considers Erskine Caldwell and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who portrayed the rural poor, and looks at how contemporary novelists like Barry Hannah respond to the selling of the South as a site of authenticity.

Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (University Press of Virginia, 1997) draws on recent scholarship on masculinity and whiteness, and looks to popular-culture texts and memoirs as well as literature. "One can hardly tell where the region's age-old worries about race and class end and its anxieties about gender begin," write the volume's editors, Anne Goodwyn Jones, an associate professor of English at the University of Florida, and Susan V. Donaldson, a professor of English and American studies at the College of William and Mary.

Fred Hobson, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, edits the series on Southern literary studies that included Mr. Gray's book. He maintains that the Agrarians' hold on the field has been loosening for at least a decade. And certainly, neither Flannery O'Connor nor Eudora Welty has longed for readers. "Women were not excluded," Mr. Hobson says, "but they had to get the stamp of approval from the white, Southern, largely male establishment."

Yet their welcome came on the establishment's terms, Ms. Yaeger says. Welty was singled out as the one worthy woman writer in an important canon-building volume by the literary critic Louis D. Rubin Jr. But his chapter on her fiction is "flavored with odd diminutions of Welty's abilities," Ms. Yaeger points out. Faulkner's Mississippi is said to be full of figures "larger than life," while Welty's state is a "tidy, protected little world." Her prose style is "entirely feminine," Mr. Rubin wrote. "Like the hummingbirds that appear frequently in her stories, it darts here and there, never quite coming to rest, tirelessly invoking light, color, the variety of experience."

That Southern women wrote or thought small -- like hummingbirds, not hawks -- is a claim that Dirt and Desire wants to bury once and for all. "My hope is to recover the political intrigue and bravura, the largeness and largesse, of fiction by southern women," Ms. Yaeger writes.

The Southern women she finds in the literature are more likely to be ornery than deferential. They revel in the dirty and the ragged. Physically, they are often larger than life, like the fleshy woman observed at the beach by the narrator of Welty's "A Memory," included in her debut collection, A Curtain of Green. "Fat hung upon her upper arms like an arrested earthslide on a hill," Welty wrote. "Her breasts hung heavy and widening like pears into her bathing suit." The voluptuous body on display does more than offend the snobbish young narrator: It disrupts her "leisured superiority," and middle-class hunger for conformity, Ms. Yaeger writes.

Straitjacketed by proscribed roles, the Southern women characters in Dirt and Desire struggle to break free, but succeed only partially. The result is prose littered with misshapen bodies and odd hybrids, children old before their time and wise beyond their years. Frankie in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding is fascinated by the figures in a freak show: the eight-foot-tall giant, the Pin Head, the island savage, and another fat lady, whose flesh "was like loose-powdered dough which she kept slapping and working with her hands." The white heroine of Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby takes a spill while water skiing across a lake. Instead of surfacing, she is pulled under by a "writhing, tangled mass of water moccasins" that ring her face.

"Southern women writers use the grotesque to map an array of social crises," the professor writes.

"The open, wounded, bleeding, excessive, corpulent, maimed, idiotic, or gargantuan body becomes the sign of a permanent emergency within the body politic."

Grotesquerie appears in plenty of fiction, but Ms. Yaeger maintains it has particular force in Southern women's writing. The very bodies in these texts suffer under the strain of "what is known but not thought," she argues. The growing demand for racial equality, ignored or resisted in daily life, erupts into "images of monstrous, ludicrous bodies."

In other cases, women's possibilities are at stake. That's why Flannery O'Connor, usually read as a Catholic writer, produces fiction that is "flat-out sadistic" in Ms. Yaeger's words."It reflects an incredible anger about how Southern women were sugared and honeyed, made into magnolias," she says.

It's a feeling she understands, growing up with "a sense that I was gargantuan or oversized in a world of petite and belle-like little girls," Ms. Yaeger writes, sharing her "own private quarrels with the South."

Raised in northern Florida in an academic family, the professor says her life as a Southerner has always been full of contradictions. She grew up in the civil-rights era, yet says the question of race was never discussed in her home. Her mother was cast as a "bourgeois southern belle matron," but chafed at the role assigned her.

As a scholar, Ms. Yaeger stayed away from the South for a long while. Her Ph.D. at Yale University was on Coleridge. But a chance perusal of Lillian Hellman's Pentimento in the early 1980's got her reading Southern fiction again. "The books resonated so much with my history," she explains. "The bizarreness of the characters. All the racial crises and the racial silence."

Still, this self-proclaimed "Dixiephobe" is ambivalent about her former home. "I'm phobic about those aspects of the South that haven't changed," she says.

According to Ms. Yaeger, Southern literature is about the collision of black and white cultures, "moments of crisis and acts of contestation."

In the standard account, those collisions happen in the political arena or in grandly stated fears over miscegenation. But Ms. Yaeger seeks out the fraught exchanges that occur everyday, over kitchen tables and household chores. Susan Tucker's Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (L.S.U. Press, 1988), is among the historical works she cites most frequently. It's the kind of new social history that Southern-literature scholars usually shy away from, Ms. Yaeger says. And it provides her with grist for reading books that address the strained ties between black workers and their uncomprehending white employers.

"In the kitchen of Member of the Wedding," for example, "you have an entire political system set up in the relationship between a young girl and a black domestic worker," Ms. Yaeger explains.

Many of the stories Ms. Yaeger reads are attuned to the importance of labor, even when that work is kept out of the main characters' sight. They recognize the significance of objects and things, what it means when property passes from one person to another.

Take Welty's 1946 novel, Delta Wedding. According to Mr. Kreyling of Vanderbilt, Welty purposefully set the work in the early 1920's, when, she said, nothing major happened in Mississippi. Yet Ms. Yaeger finds plenty of social complexity beneath the surface of a book she says Welty intended as "Little Women in a Southern context."

For one thing, cotton lint hovers in the atmosphere, "a scattered, fragmented, uneasy whiteness" that the black domestics have to clean up. And in general, Welty lets the reader know whose hard work is behind the wedding preparations. "If a cake needs to be carried, who's carrying it? Welty never allows you to forget that it's black labor that helps to run this extraordinarily comfortable world."

Among her next projects, Ms. Yaeger will edit an Oxford University Press volume of criticism on Eudora Welty. Mr. Kreyling, who has written his own scholarly study of Welty, says the Michigan professor's readings have led him to look anew at the writer. "I can't write about Welty the way I started," he says. "It's so antique, it embarrasses me."

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