Chapter 7.
Conclusion:
The Sinister in Contemporary Southern Literature: Change and Stasis in the Survival
Narrative
Some of our most ancient legends involve the topic of incest, so it would be
unjust merely to call incest a “Southern” theme. The story of Oedipus, who, upon
discovering the sexual relationship in which he had unwittingly entered with his own
mother, and subsequently gouged out his eyes and banished himself from the land, is
arguably the most well-known incest narrative; the tale of Oedipus has even garnered its
own Freudian complex and a barrage of connected jokes for centuries to follow. We
might also consider the tale of Lot in the Bible. Lot, himself deemed a “righteous man”
by God, drunkenly impregnated his virgin daughters. In the book of Leviticus, however,
we learn that the act of incest is condemned by the same Lord that called Lot, an
incestuous father, “righteous.” Even one of the holiest texts could not tell us,
definitively, how we are to respond to incest. Instead, it is our “gut” response that
dictates culture’s mixed reception. These stories speak to the ways in which incest as a
theme has remained within a shared cultural psyche that is greater than any one region or
religion. Incest, whether in literature, popular culture, or the media, fascinates us as
much as it elicits a visceral response. Incest is revolting to many but also confounding
and thus dually something at which we, like a violent car accident, gawk but feel disgust
and fear despite our looking. Why this topic? What is it that makes the idea of incest so
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revolting, and yet incest makes us want to know the gritty details behind the act? How
could one commit the ultimate depravity—that is, taking sexually from one’s own stock?
If we move into a contemporary discussion of incest in the Southern literary
tradition and, further, in the Southern Gothic tradition, we might first consider a Gothic
literary history of incest themes. I taught the poetry of Lord Byron in a British Literature
class a few months ago, and while Byron is known as the “rock star” writer of his era, it
was one particular aspect of his character that most elicited a strong reaction from my
students. Upon my mentioning that Lord Byron was known for being engaged in a
controversial and complicated sexual relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh,
students, alternately, gasped and gagged while raising their hands for further questions. I
remembered this telling moment when I sat down to write this conclusion, and so I did
what any researcher would do—I tried to find that link from the Southern Gothic back to
that day in class when Lord Byron’s tale collected such a strong reaction. The first thing
that I discovered was a review of David Crane’s book about Byron, in which A.W.
Allworthy writes, “The hook is [Byron’s] complex sex life, hinting at Italian lads and
Greek sailors, and culminating in that most delicious of sins, scorned in practically every
society except by those who live in the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky.”1 It would
seem that the Gothic link to the Southern Gothic theme of incest is just as close as
another crude and misplaced reference to the people of the Southern region. Moreover,
Byron’s Manfred, a dramatic poem written in 1817, purportedly expounds on Byron’s
personal romantic involvement with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Manfred, the poem’s
A.W. Allworthy, “Review: The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of
the Byrons,” RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities 34, no. 2
(2003): www.ralphmag.org/BW/byron-sisters.html.
1
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brooding protagonist, is tormented by guilt that he feels for the incestuous relationship he
had with his sister, Astarte, although the incest is never explicitly stated but widely
understood by scholars. Manfred, an arrogant though angst-ridden superhuman, begs
supernatural spirits to grant him “forgetfulness.”2 His constant guilt and depression due
to the fact that he and Astarte “loved each other as we should not love,”3 and Astarte’s
subsequent death, leaves Manfred longing for her forgiveness. In what appears to be a
self-involved yearning for someone that is the mirror image of himself—“Her hair, her
features, all, to the very tone/ Even of her voice, they said were like to mine”4—Manfred
still recognizes that they committed the “deadliest sin,” which is “to love as we have
loved.”5 Manfred’s incestuous attachment is as familiar to this Southern scholar as any
contemporary tale of the South: he is the Gothic embodiment of Faulkner’s tormented
Quentin Compson, whose narcissistic longing for his own sister, the idealized Caddy,
eventually brings about his demise.
This link between the two Gothic traditions, however, is greater than two literary
protagonists. If we merely reduce it to one defining theme, then we could say that the
Southern Gothic tradition and Southern Literature, in general, like the Gothic literary
tradition, are both concerned with stasis versus change. For example, Horace Walpole’s
1764 book, The Castle of Otranto, which is generally considered the first Gothic novel,
illustrates many of the defining characteristics of the genre that also carry over into
2
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2,
eighth edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2006), 639.
3
Ibid., 646.
4
Ibid., 650.
5
Ibid., 657.
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Southern literary works. With both traditions’ emphasis on the past, family secrets
coming to light, crumbling buildings meant to reveal a deeper decay within the society,
and a family isolated from the rest of the world, we can trace all of these ideas to one
connecting theme: incest, the ultimate manifestation of stagnation. To use one readily
available and widely known example, we could merely look to William Faulkner’s short
story, “A Rose for Emily,” as an illustration of stasis versus change under an incestuous
alliance in the Southern Gothic genre. In this tale, Emily represents the steadily
crumbling Old South. She lives in a Gothic-style mansion, abides by the laws of a
bygone era, and relies on the assistance of her African American “manservant.”6 We
know that she grew up under the debilitating rule of an overbearing father, who had an
unnatural proclivity to block access of available suitors to his daughter. This, in and of
itself, constitutes an incestuous attachment of sorts. By the end of the story, just before
the discovery of Emily’s missing suitor’s corpse in her attic, the servant, whose name we
never learn, opens the door for the townspeople to enter Emily’s home after her death,
thus giving them access to her hidden life for the first time in years. He then walks
straight out the back door, and no one ever hears from him again.
If Emily and her father represent an unchanged South of the past and the
townspeople, who forever attempt and fail to pull Emily into their contemporary mores
represent change, then the symbolic leaving of the servant at Emily’s passing is the
moment where the old Southern empire finally falls. This could only occur, however,
when that daughter of incest, Emily, passes away. This instance of incest is subtle, yet it
William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily,” in Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, ed.
Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson (Boston: Thomson, 2006), 556.
6
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illustrates just one way in which the Old South was slow to transform. Emily’s father
becomes the ultimate containment of static continuity, as he worked to keep his daughter
from creating a new generation, thus maintaining his reign as head of the household and
upholding his old Southern traditions. The servant is the last relic of a South that is no
longer functioning: African Americans doing the bidding of rich, white people. With the
servant’s exit, the final crumbling ritual of the Old South is enacted. Like the original
Gothic novel, we see a struggle between the collapse of the old guard and the
preservation of the aristocracy amidst a backdrop of political and social upheaval. The
changing South, because of its history of violence and social turmoil, creates the apt site
for this transformation.
Just like Emily in this short story, other female Faulkner characters expected to
maintain the Southern “stasis” quo—Caddy in The Sound and the Fury and Judith in
Absalom, Absalom!, for example7—do not get a voice. We hear about them but never
from them. The incest that occurs can still be, if we read blindly into a tragically
beautiful Southern past, something chivalrous and necessary. What follows this literary
tradition, however, are the Southern female writers that locate something far more sinister
within the incest theme. Incest remains as a symbol of stagnation, but the daughter now
becomes an apt vehicle for change and movement. It is now her voice that we hear—
Further illustrations of Faulkner’s use of incest as a means to depict stasis and change can be
found in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. In The Sound and the Fury,
Caddy is the daughter and sister whose male family members try to keep her sexually unchanged.
Because she cannot uphold this standard and because she marries a Northerner—the ultimate
betrayal to the Southern practice of cultural xenophobia—she can no longer exist in Southern
society. This scenario plays out doubly in Absalom, Absalom!, which I discuss in depth in the
introductory chapter.
7
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whether it is in Southern women’s novels or plays—and it resounds beyond the idealized
longings of her brothers and fathers.
To return to a quote by Richard H. King with which I began in the introductory
chapter, King writes, “to choose incest is to attempt the primal repetition which culture
forbids. It is to stop or reverse time, to undo what has been done, to unravel the social
fabric, and to regress to the pre-social.”8 Herein is the key to incest as a Southern theme:
for much of the rest of the world, the South is still idealized or shunned accordingly
because of its seeming static nature; it is that pre-social force that has always been slow
to evolve toward new practices and policies with the rest of the nation. Incest creates the
ultimate center for this region that is viewed as both backward and unchanged. When we
filter this theme into the literature, however, we get a much more complex trope on the
incest word. Incest could be the regulation of love laws as much as it could represent
cultural xenophobia and a fear of outside forces infiltrating the region’s families and their
traditions. Incest could be, as it often is, the link between an overbearing patriarch and a
daughter who desires change. Incest could be depicted in an isolated occurrence, or it
could reverberate in a long cycle that not only spans generations, but also spans various
“Souths.” Regardless of the novel’s or play’s intended effect, each incest encounter,
ultimately, winds back to the struggle between cultural stagnation over progression.
In Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, Bone, a victim of abuse at the
hands of her stepfather, is the illegitimate daughter of a teenage mother. Marked at birth
by the red stamp on her birth certificate, Bone is already labeled when she first arrives in
8
Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South,
1930-1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 126.
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this world and encounters a lifetime of tragedy in her early years.9 More than just a tale
of abuse, however, Bone’s complex narrative gives us a mere glimpse of Glen’s
molestation before rerouting its path around the abuse. That is, we hear from Bone’s
perspective for years before she is eventually raped in the final scene. Similar to Bone’s
tale, Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster also depicts a young girl who has been labeled as
“white trash.” Though Ellen escapes her father’s sexually abusive advances, like Bone,
she must learn to navigate a hierarchical Southern society that dismisses her as rubbish.
These things remain constant: overbearing fathers, failed mothers, and a Southern caste
system that works under a thinly veiled guise of Christian decorum. What changes,
however, is that both girls, seemingly without any power, become the agents of
movement and progression. Bone knows that she is no Southern Belle and thusly refuses
to uphold a Southern tradition of racial division. Instead, she locates solidarity between
her place as “trash” and the place of African Americans in the South. Ellen follows suit
by cultivating a genuine friendship with her African American friend, Starletta. Even
with the backlash she receives from her classmates, family members, and various
members of her divided Southern world, Ellen proudly brings Starletta to her new home
with her adoptive mother where she states, “I already told my new mama I would like for
her to make a fuss over how pretty Starletta is. But not the kind of fuss that says you are
pretty to be colored. The kind that says you are pretty and that is all. The other way does
not count.”10 Here, Ellen forces change in the form of improving race relations, and she
extends this personal cause to include the advancement of our notions of beauty. Not
9
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina (New York: Plume, 1992).
10
Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1987), 123.
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only do both girls transcend the limitations of their socio-economic class, but also they
work to dissolve the racial barrier that separates the people of their town. Caught in the
physical representation of change—each girl is on the cusp of adolescence—they become
the force that, whether attacked by incestuous abuse or not, refuses to stand still against
the time-stopping effects of that same violation. They create movement and
transformation against class, race, and gender.
In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie believes that her children were
conceived from incestuous rape at the hands of her father. Much later in life, however,
she learns something that changes everything about the way she views herself. The man
she thought was her father is actually no relation at all, thus making her children exempt
from the taboo she felt was attached to their birth.11 As Celie has endured years of
physical and verbal abuse from her husband Albert, she has been halted emotionally by
the belief that her early incestuous rape marked her for tragedy. When she learns that the
stigma of incest has been removed, many things change for Celie: she gets the confidence
she needs to start her own business, and she inherits the land and the house that belonged
to her real father. In Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, incest exists as a cycle that spans
generations and regions. Ursa Corregidora’s family legacy connects back to her greatgrandmother’s story of slavery on a plantation in Brazil run by a sadistic Portugese man
named Corregidora. This man raped Ursa’s great-grandmother, the product of which was
Ursa’s grandmother, who Corregidora also raped, thus producing Ursa’s mother. This
complex bloodline of abuse and incest is especially complicated, for Ursa now holds the
name of the man that started this violent cycle. Ursa, like Celie, finds herself in an
11
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket Books, 1982), 182-3.
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abusive marriage to Mutt, and due to Mutt’s physical abuse, Ursa can no longer have
children. Ursa feels that this inability to “make generations”12 has halted her chance to
start a new and fresh family pattern, thus ending the tragic cycles of the past.
Everywhere around them, both Celie and Ursa encounter women with stories that are
similar to their own, and their tales become interwoven with the abuse narratives of these
women within their communities. As Celie and Ursa are victims of abuse or a part of a
legacy of incest rape, their lot seems indelibly written—their lives halted at the fixed
point where the incest first attempted to reverse their familial progression. Celie and
Ursa, however, not only find self-esteem and empowerment in the wake of trauma, but
they also find a way to forgive the abusive men in their own lives, thus upsetting a world
of causal elements, as both Albert and Mutt are reformed by the very women they
formally tormented. For Celie and Ursa, nothing remains the same. A seemingly
inevitable succession of abuse is broken, and change occurs through the women’s ability
to pull from within them a desire to shuck the tragic tradition of their family heritage.
In the feminist expressionism plays Getting Out by Marsha Norman and How I
Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, two women are haunted by the abusive past that
manifests in a split-character portrayal on stage. The traumatic after-effects of years of
abuse culminate in a story that does not end in madness but, instead, becomes a tale of
self-reconciliation between the woman survivor of today and the abused girl that she once
was in the past. Norman’s Getting Out follows Arlie, a juvenile delinquent who was
sexually molested by her father, and Arlene, the matured Arlie who is released into the
world after years of incarceration. What makes her story particularly apt for the
12
Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 10.
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discussion of stagnation versus change is the bleak socioeconomic system in which
Arlene is released. She has the choice of returning to her old means of income as a
prostitute, thus choosing stasis, which offers a much more direct route to cash, or she can,
instead, take the hard road to change by working as an unskilled laborer for low wages
and long hours. At the helm of her misery is a long line of male abusers or father figures
that have taken advantage of their role in Arlene’s life. Her oppression can be linked to
that of Li’l Bit in Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. Li’l Bit’s uncle, Peck, started
molesting her when she was eleven. With no other father in the picture, Peck moves
handedly between the role of caretaker and seducer. Like Arlene, Li’l Bit’s life seems
filled with some intangible anger, and it is not until she fully revisits the inception of her
induction into the abusive process that she begins to understand the truth of Peck’s role in
her life; that is, she no longer sees herself as culpable in her own abuse, therefore
relieving herself of the guilt that has unwittingly made her emotionally stunted. Arlene,
who is also seemingly devoid of emotions—a common symptom of victims of sexual
abuse—finally becomes “whole” again, as the split-selves of Arlie and Arlene merge to
create the same voice on the stage. Marsha Norman calls this the “love story between
Arlie and Arlene.”13 For both Arlene and Li’l Bit, their “love stories” begin with a look
to the past. That is, their change or progression actually starts with a move backward and
with a discerning view into the history that has made them the women they are today.
Working against seemingly insurmountable forces—broken relationships, abusive pasts,
poor economic prospects, personal guilt, and little support from outside sources—these
13
Marsha Norman, in a Getting Out post-production discussion, Berry College, Mount Berry,
GA, September 26, 2009.
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women find the change they need to break away from the incest abuse that punctuated
their early lives by merely looking backward to move forward.
While each of these novels and plays depict transformation in the face of a
seemingly fixed cycle, not all Southern women’s writing is as triumphant over stasis.
Both Naomi Wallace’s play, In the Fields of Aceldama, and Carson McCullers’s stage
adaptation of her novel, The Member of the Wedding, portray young women that initially
work as agents of change against an oppressive Southern environment wrought with
cultural xenophobia and debilitating love laws. Despite their greatest efforts, however,
these young women are eventually swallowed up and destroyed or forced to conform by
their respective immovable societies. Wallace’s In the Fields of Aceldama is the story of
a family dealing with the recent death of their daughter, Annie, who appears in flashback
or ghost form throughout the play. Surrounding this tale is an invisible “enemy” that is,
according to Wallace’s stage directions, meant to be “whatever people or nation in the
world happens to be at odds with United States foreign policy.”14 Annie’s mother,
Mattie, was herself the victim of incest abuse. One thing that seems to be symptomatic
of her childhood abuse is Mattie’s desire to keep Annie safe from outside forces that are
unseen by the audience. Sharing Mattie’s fear of foreign bodies is her husband Henry,
who extends this xenophobic anxiety to the removal of Annie away from any other male
suitors that he does not see fit for his daughter. Annie’s wild nature and her desire to
escape her domestic confinement ends in her death when she is thrown from a horse.
14
Naomi Wallace, In the Fields of Aceldama, in Best of the Fest: A Collection of New Plays
Celebrating 10 Years of London New Play Festival, ed. Phil Stren (London: Aurora Metro Press,
1999), 220.
205
While McCullers’s play does not end in the death of the protagonist, it does claim
victims at the expense of impenetrable love laws in the pre-Civil Rights South. Frankie is
a tomboy with an ambiguous physical appearance. She shuns all traditionally femalegendered toys, activities, and interests. Incest plays a much less menacing role in this
play, as it merely manifests, innocently, within Frankie’s desire to be married to her
brother, Jarvis, and to his fiancée, Janice. As Frankie’s awareness of the world grows, she
begins to understand the limitations of who is acceptable to love in her society. She also
reads in the newspapers about the atom bomb, which makes her feel as if the world is a
much more terrifying place than she had previously realized.15 Frankie’s cousin, John
Henry, who is much more feminine than Frankie and who loves to play with the dolls that
Frankie discards, dies unexpectedly at the end of the drama. This coincides with the
inevitable hanging of a family friend, Honey Brown, who is a black man accused of
murdering a white man. All of these incidents transform Frankie from the assured young
tomboy into a pathetic conformist version of her former self.
Both Annie and Frankie cannot function as agents of change within their Southern
worlds. Annie wants to escape her home and see the world, unlike her mother, who
moved directly from her father’s house to her husband’s house. Unfortunately, even her
overbearing father’s unnaturally protective nature cannot keep her safe from the outside
world. Understanding that an escape from her family cycle will likely not occur and left
without much socioeconomic stability, Annie dies tragically when she is just a teenage
girl. Frankie, while still living at the end of the play, dies a tragic “death” of sorts, as she
changes her appearance abruptly to fit in with the neighborhood girls who previously
15
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (New York: New Directions, 1951), 90.
206
shunned her and even takes on the more feminized moniker “Frances.” Revolting against
the idealized love for her brother from her youth, the new Frances understands that she
must conform to society’s ideals of love if she is to survive in her Southern society. In
these two plays by Wallace and McCullers, we get a visioning of change, though the
tragic and stagnant ending for both girls is a return to the preconceived limitations of
their gender and class. What these tales do contain, however, is a complex narration from
the perspective of the girl, rather than a skewed visioning through the lens of her brother,
her father, or her society.
Finally, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Lydia Diamond’s stage adaptation of the
novel also leave little room for transformation within the body of the texts, but they do
reveal the consequences of familial stasis. The protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, is the selfperceived “ugly” African American girl that longs for blue eyes. Like her parents, who
came from the South to the North in search of a better life, she is incapable of attaining
the white ideal of beauty and success that is all-consuming in the African American
Lorain, Ohio, community. Pecola’s mother, Pauline, longs to have the face of the women
she sees on the movie screens, and her father, Cholly, does not have the economic means
to be a property owner like the white fathers in town. Pecola is the meeting ground for
all of their failed desires; she encompasses the truth of the limitations in their lives.
After a historical meandering through each of the Breedlove’s past experiences,
the story culminates in Cholly’s rape of his daughter in the middle of the kitchen in their
home. His abuse is prompted by the memory of Pauline, whose actions are reiterated
through Pecola, as she scratches the back of her calf with her toe in way that reminds
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Cholly of the younger version of his wife.16 Cholly, in this moment, not only returns to
the past, but also repeats the cycle of failed parenting that he experienced from his own
parents, who abandoned him at birth. Oddly, however, Cholly believes that he can give
nothing to Pecola in this moment except his complex love and hate for her, which is
violently portrayed through the rape. He remembers when he gave a “gentle nibble” to
Pauline on her calf when the fateful scratching was first enacted, and it made his future
wife giggle.17 As this gesture first brought joy to the woman that Cholly loved, it is a
quick jump in time to the present, where he believes that, again, he can give something
back to the daughter that he now pities. After Cholly retreats and forever disappears,
Pauline walks in and witnesses Pecola lying on the floor after the abuse. It is as if their
faces mirror one another, as Pauline “looms” over Pecola.18 This scene becomes the fullcircle return to a doomed past. Cholly never had the chance to witness a healthy parental
relationship, so his inadequate attempt to be tender despite his disgust for his daughter is
played out in a violent return to the only moment of happiness he can conjure: the
memory when he first met Pauline before he knew that the world would have nothing to
offer either one of them. The symbolic mirroring of Pauline’s face with Pecola’s as she
stares down at her abused daughter completes the path of doubling that clinches this
inescapable cycle: the mother looks at the child, who looks at the mother, who looks back
at the child, ad infinitum. As this scene is far too explicit to act literally on the stage,
Lydia Diamond’s stage interpretation locates a reasonable negotiation between the
16
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 127.
17
Ibid., 128.
18
Ibid., 129.
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novel’s tragic telling of the incest and the necessary reworking for the purpose of the
theater. Ultimately, however, we have the same portrayal of a family—the Breedloves—
who are unable to live up to the promise of their name.
While incest is never the one focus of any of these stories, it is the unifying theme
that, inevitably, returns to that thread of stasis versus change. If we think again of our
most readily recalled incest tale, that of Oedipus, then we could ask what is it that is so
horrifying about the notion of incest? In fact, there is nothing more terrifying than the
halting of time. Imagine Oedipus’s terror when that moment of recognition occurs. Not
only has he committed an act of sexual deviance, but also he has stopped his familial
progression. His children are not so much a new generation as they are a return to
something that has already been established and passed. Oedipus’s life of progress and
success, in one instant, becomes a reality that all of his meanderings toward newness
were, in fact, a million steps backward. Our lives are lived in order to change and to
create. We cannot stop time, though incest becomes the stand-in literary symbol of this
stasis. Where Southern women writers create a myriad of tropes on the theme of incest,
we view various triumphs over this violation; progress is made in place of patriarchal
bigotry. Love laws are demolished or reinforced, just as racial division and social
hierarchies are also challenged and/or upheld. If the South is thought to be backward and
stilted, then so, too, are our people and our literary figures. Combating this, however, are
the re-imagined heroines and survivors of Southern sexual abuse. They are the progress
where everyone else around them has ceased to move forward. They are evidence of
failed change, thus moving us to action. They are the evolution in a halted region.
209