Taylor Carrere
Craft Paper Analysis
3/20/14
Biography:
Doris Betts was born June 4, 1932 in Pittsboro. She was the only child of her parents,
William Elmore and Mary Ellen Waugh. She attended college at UNC-Greensboro and later
served as the Assistant Dean of the Honor Program at UNC-Chapel Hill from 1978-1981.1 At
UNC- Chapel Hill, she held the title of alumni distinguished professor until her death in 2012.
She won several awards for her short stories and novels, including three Sir Walter Raleigh
Awards, the Southern Book Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal for
the short story. Her most widely printed short story, “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” became the basis of
a musical called “Violet” that won the New York Critics Circle Award, which later became an
Academy Award winning short film.2 Her book Souls Raised from the Dead made The New
York Times’ list of best twenty books of 1994. She died in 2012 at her home in Pittsboro.
Summary:
In her collection Beasts of the Southern Wild, Doris Betts best known story is “The
Ugliest Pilgrim.” It tells the story of Violet, a young woman from the mountains whose father
accidently disfigured her with his ax. The story begins in 1969 when she starts out on a bus trip
to meet a preacher that she has seen on TV who supposedly heals people. On the way, she meets
two soldiers. Monty is a handsome white farmer, and Flick is a smooth card-playing African
American. They becomes friends, and the boys worry that Violet is being naïve when it comes
to the preacher. Violet feels attracted to Monty who flirts with her and does not seem to mind her
1
2
http://www.knowsouthernhistory.net/Culture/Literature/doris_betts.htm
http://www.nclhof.org/inductees/2004-2/doris-betts/
scar. At a stop, Monty makes love to her, and he begs her to stop at Fort Smith on her way back
from the preacher, so that he can meet back up with her. She doesn’t believe he will be there and
says she won’t stop. The preacher turns out to be a fake, but Violet still hopes her face is fixed
by God. She hopes Monty won’t recognize her when she does stop at Fort Smith, but when he
does, she runs from him back to the bus. He catches her, and she is glad.
In the title story of the book, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Carol Walsh is a school
teacher who lives a double life in her dreams. In real life, she feels neglected by her husband and
her children who do not seem to understand her. The story starts, however, when she is
dreaming about a post-revolutionary world where African Americans have enslaved whites. She
is bought by Sam Porter, a good-looking and wealthy black man. He treats her like a favored
mistress, and she falls in love with him. In her real-life parallel, though, she has more trouble
connecting with her husband. In the last dream of the story, she tells Sam that she was raped by
a white man and names her husband, and Sam kills him in her dreams for her.
In “Burning the Bed,” Isabel returns home to take care of her dying father. The story
subtly hints that she is a lesbian and that her father does not know, but it does not say directly.
We learn that she and her father are all that is left of her family as her mother is dead and her
brother died young in the Korean War. Isabel constantly writes to her girlfriend Brenda but only
receives postcards in return. She hopes to burn her father’s bed with Brenda after his death, but
at the end of the story hears another woman’s voice on the phone when she calls Brenda late at
night.
Craft Analysis:
Betts uses diction and tone in a masterful way that enhances not only the setting, but also
feels truly genuine to her characters. The language does not necessarily appear to establish her
characters as much as it extends from her character. The phrase “praise God” that Violet repeats
in “The Ugliest Pilgrim” when anything good happens to her in order to seem grateful does not
work to establish her as this religious, grateful character, but seems to span more from her wacky
personality already seen throughout the story. Betts also uses phrasing that give readers this ideal
character of a Southern woman from the mountains. Her sentences are also very blunt, reflecting
the bunt way in which Violet views her ugliness and people’s general aversion to her. This
bluntness and southern flare combines when Violet describes the people around her and her own
emotional state, such as when she thinks of the only man she has known besides Monty. She
says with painful honesty that the boy made love with her at the end of her graduation only to
win a bet: “And he asked. And I thought, I’m entitled. Won him a five dollar bet. Didn’t do
nothing for me” (29). Betts uses a varied sentence structure throughout many of her works, but it
is her blunt, short statements like in the previous example that give many of her stories the
individual southern and raw flare she does so well.
In all her stories, Betts presents unique and believable characters. In “The Ugliest
Pilgrim,” readers may have a hard time believing that a woman could think that a preacher could
heal her face, yet Betts makes it believable because she doesn’t make Violet a victim. Instead,
she characterizes her as a sassy and witty Southern woman who has been sheltered so that she is
gullible enough to see this preacher as an answer to all her prayers. In “Beast of the Southern
Wild,” she gives us insight into a woman who is seen by her husband as a “know it all” and an
“ice queen” (68). Readers get to go even deeper into her character and feel her sense of neglect
through her dreams. These dreams seem very uncharacteristic for a white woman in the South of
the 1970’s because he finds the happiness she longs for in an imaginary African American man
who she is subordinate to. With Carol, Betts explores the longing side of a woman who is
unfulfilled and seeks to find happiness in an unconventional love that she can only experience
safely through her dreams. In “Burning the Bed,” Betts brings to light an outsider’s perspective
on the deaths of loved ones with the death of Isabel’s brother and the impending death of her
father. Betts also avoids making Isabel feel characteristically alienated by the people of the
town, such as the ambulances drivers, who look down on her for her lifestyle choices (78).
Instead of withdrawing from society and worrying about what others think of her, she likes to set
her own path and does things that fulfill her rather than approve her to society, like burning her
father’s bed and wanting a woman instead of a man.
Betts roots her stories strongly in southern rural areas. This is most prevalent in her
stories “The Ugliest Pilgrim” and “Burning the Bed” because both of the female protagonists
have origins in rural towns. Betts captures the southern small town and the people who live in it
with more than simply her descriptions about the countryside. She does it through her
character’s language, religious associations, and the subtle tensions of race and culture that she
places in her stories. In “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” Betts firmly establishes readers in this southern
mountain culture through Violet’s dialect and her background. Violet talks about growing up in
the mountains with her father and his making them whisky out of potato peels and drinking it
with her (18). That definitely rings true of a mountain culture. The short story also contains
many references to religion as Violet compares herself to a leper needing healing from God and
constantly praises Him for the minor details of her journey in hopes to appear grateful (14).
Betts also creates this tight-knit, somewhat judgmental society in her short stories by
adding elements of controversial nature and having her protagonists push against the norms that
restrict them. In “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” the character of Flick pushes back on this stereotype that
African Americans could not be trust-worthy or intelligent which was still prevalent in some
southern societies at the time of late sixties. He, along with Monty, worries about Violet and tries
to make her see reason. These racial tensions are even more striking in “The Beasts of a
Southern Wild,” where an unfulfilled Southern wife and mother seeks happiness in her dreams
with a black man instead of being fulfilled in her role as a wife to a white conservative. The
protagonist in “Burning the Bed” also stands as an outsider in the small town she grows up in
because she cannot tell her father about her lifestyle choice. She does not seem to fit into the
religious society of her once home as evident by her uncomfortable feelings about the preacher
and the women from the church that cook for her father (79). All of these stories lend to this
idea that Betts’ characters are bigger than the setting and society in which they are placed in and
do not restrict themselves to that society’s norms simply because it is the appropriate thing to do.
Betts changes up her point of views and shows that she is not a one-trick pony. Her story
“The Ugliest Pilgrim” was completely in first-person, and “Burning the Bed” is done in thirdperson. “The Beast of the Southern Wild” is a hybrid combining both first- and third- person
narration. It uses third-person to describe Carol’s real life and first-person in her dream
sequences. This use of first-person in Carol’s dreams creates this illusion that the dreams are
more real than life for Carol, and it draws readers in by giving them more direct encounter with
her thoughts, blurring the real and imagined for readers as well as Carol.
Betts utilizes both points of view well, but her unique characters shine when speaking
directly through first person. Readers can get a genuine sense of Violet’s odd-ball character as
she narrates her adventures with her own spacey way of thinking, such as the way she describes
her fellow passengers and the way she will attract men after the preacher has fixed her face (12).
While “Burning the Bed” still grips readers and speaks from Isabel’s viewpoint, not every piece
of the story feels as saturated with her personality as it does when Betts writes in first-person.
Betts does not overdue dialogue in her stories. When she does do it, however, she places
it in such a way to help us understand something about either the characters or the plot. “The
Ugliest Pilgrim” contains the most dialogue and provides us with a lot of insight into characters’
backgrounds and personalities. Violet’s accented way of talking lets readers know that she is a
southern girl from the mountains before she ever says so directly. Flint also shows his
introspective and intellectual side as he warns Monty not to judge Violet by her lack of good
looks. He tells him, “There is one thing, though. Good looks in a woman is almost like a wall.
She can use it to shut you outside. You never know what she’s like, that’s all” (26).
In “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the dialogue furthers the plot so that readers get a true
sense of what motivates Carol to dream that she is loved by a black man. While one can deduce
from the general storyline that she feels that her husband does not completely understand her, it
is not till the last conversation she has with Sam that one really grasps that she feels an enmity
towards her husband. She claims that she never desired him or felt understood by him: “I know
his name. That’s all we know, each other’s names” (75). These two sentences seem minor, but
they are important because readers finally understand the full extent of how this marriage never
produced happiness.
The thing Betts accomplishes so well in all her fiction is to make readers move along
with her as she tells her stories and become invested in her characters. She makes even the more
unrealistic aspects of her stories feel completely legitimate. Is it likely that a young woman
would believe a preacher could heal her face, but instead have a handsome, young man begin to
fall in love with her? Is it likely that a teacher and mother would live a completely separate life
in her dreams that none of her family suspects? Betts has a true talent for keeping the readers
enchanted by her story telling, so that they are willing to suspend their disbelief to enjoy her
fascinating characters.
She does not have all questions answered by the end of her stories, but often leaves her
readers saying, “What happened next?” As readers, we want to see the moment when Monty
catches up with Violet and makes her stay with him. We want to know why Carol called her
husband a rapist. We want to know whether Isabel broke up with her girlfriend and burned her
father’s bed. This lack of complete endings do leave readers frustrated, but they also produce
thought about the plot and character by depriving them of the complete satisfaction of a neat and
bow-tied finish.