Literature of the American South

Contents
The Beginnings.......................................................................................................................................2
17th Century Southern Literature............................................................................................................2
18th Century Southern Literature............................................................................................................3
Literature of the Revolutionary and Post-revolutionary South..............................................................3
Literature of the Old South (1815-1840)................................................................................................4
Antebellum Southern Literature............................................................................................................4
Civil War Southern Literature.................................................................................................................4
Post-civil War Southern Literature.........................................................................................................5
Realism in Southern Literature (1890 – 1920)........................................................................................5
Myths and Stereotypes in and of the American South...........................................................................5
Southern male and female stereotypes.............................................................................................6
Slave narratives......................................................................................................................................6
Solomon Northup – 12 Years a Slave..............................................................................................6
Poe's Detective Fiction...........................................................................................................................7
1. The Murders in the Rue Morgue – first detective story ever written.........................................7
2. The Mystery of Marie Roget.......................................................................................................7
3. The Purloined Letter...................................................................................................................7
Local Colour in Louisiana........................................................................................................................7
Kate Chopin: Desiree's Baby...........................................................................................................8
Plantation Fiction...................................................................................................................................9
Antebellum plantation fiction..............................................................................................................10
Postbellum plantation fiction...............................................................................................................10
Margaret Mitchell – Gone With the Wind....................................................................................11
Southern African American Literature..................................................................................................11
Richard Wright – The Ethics of Living Jim Crow............................................................................11
Richard Wright – Big Boy Leaves Home........................................................................................12
Southern Gothic...................................................................................................................................13
Influences.........................................................................................................................................13
Faulkner and Southern Gothic..............................................................................................................13
Time in Faulkner's Southern Gothic fiction.......................................................................................13
 Place in Faulkner's Southern Gothic fiction......................................................................................13
The Idea of Race...............................................................................................................................14
The Motif of Hurt Woman................................................................................................................14
Themes, Ideas, Motifs......................................................................................................................14
William Faulkner – Light in August...............................................................................................14
Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire.........................................................................15
Flannery O'Connor – A Good Man is Hard to Find........................................................................16
Alice Walker – Everyday Use........................................................................................................17

The Beginnings
- the accounts from 4 major expeditions to Virginia
o Arthur Barlowe's in 1584
o Ralph Lane's in 1585
o John White's in 1587 and 1590
- Barlowe's account portrayed America as paradise

Thomas Harriot: A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588): a
pamphlet about the possibilities for marketing American commodities, the natural foods,
plants, wildlife, and people in America

17th Century Southern Literature

- promotional literature (promoted free land and natural resources)
- defined America and what it meant to be American
- a response to the wide-spread negative images of the New World and its settlers
- the major single theme of American literature – the American dream – flows directly
from it
 Robert Johnson, 1609, 1612
 Lord De La Warr, 1611
 Edward Waterhouse, 1622
 John Hammond – Leah and Rachel; or, The Two Fruitful Sisters, Virginia and Maryland,
1656
 captain John Smith:
- A True Relation in Virginia - first work in English in a permanent colony
- A Map of Virginia
- The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles
- the first one who said he "loved America"  America as his most significant
experience
- the first full formation of the American Dream
- introduced Amerindian relationships
 - deals with later major theme of American literature (the idyllic dream of love
between races; the threat of warfare and genocide)
- inspiring and thoughtful in treating such subjects as history, geography,
aspirations, and vanity of existence
 Andrew White and Cecil Calvert – A Declaration of the Lord Baltimore's Plantation in
Mary-land
 the anonymous pamphlet – A Brief Description of the Province of Carolina

anti-promotional literature: ballads, chapbooks, rogue literature, plays – mocking the

overblown accounts of America as a land of milk and honey

A Net for a Night Raven

The Woman...Outwitted...Sold...to Virginia

18th Century Southern Literature

- diversity of forms, themes, and genres
 Hugh Jones – Present State of Virginia – contributes to the developing myth of the
gracious, urbane Cavalier Virginian
 Daniel Delany Sr. – The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland, to the Benefit of English
Laws – argues that English laws should not automatically be in force in America
 John Lawson – History of North Carolina
 Patrick Tailfer, Hugh Anderson, David Douglas – True and Historical Narrative of the
Colony of Georgia in America
 William Byrd II
- The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina
- A Progress to the Mines
- The secret History of the Line
- uses humour and realism to describe the life along the dividing line/frontier
between Virginia's settled areas and the deep forest
- had liberal opinions about the Indians and blacks

Literature of the Revolutionary and Post-revolutionary South

 Thomas Jefferson
o A Summary View on the Rights of British America
o The Declaration of Independence – clear and logical statement of why
America wanted its independence
o A Bill to Establishing Religious Freedom
o Notes on the State of Virginia – discusses, among other things, the institution
of slavery in the South
 St. George Tucker
 William Wirt
Literature of the Old South (1815-1840)
 Southern romanticism – developing from Cooper, Byron, and Scott
- differed sharply from the philosophical romanticism of Northern writers – the
emphasis is on the mythic elements of history rather than the metaphysical dilemmas
 the minstrel show – elements of popular theatre with musical adaptations of slave songs
"composed" by white minstrels
- Thomas D. Rice – an actor
- helped fix the black stereotypes and testified to the white fascination with African-
American culture
 William Gilmore Simms – The Partisan, Guy Rivers, The Yemassee
 William Alexander Caruthers – The Kentuckian in New York
 John Pendleton Kennedy – Swallow Barn
 Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in Rue Morgue, The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
- repressed allegories concerning the anxiety, guilt, and fear emanating from slavery

Antebellum Southern Literature

 the dominant genre – romance (sentimental, domestic, historical, Gothic)
o action-packed, descriptive, moralistic, sometimes irrational or bizarre, openly
symbolic
o a happy ending
 expressed political, social, and moral attitudes of the antebellum South
 J.P. Kennedy, Nathaniel B. Tucker, William A. Caruthers, John Esten Cooke
 their fiction is characterized by: pride in the South, a concern for political issues,
particularly slavery and secession, and a patriotic devotion to Virginia and its Cavalier
legend
 melodramatic romance: used historical happenings as an excuse for the exploration of
violent criminal or sexual passions
o Joseph Holt Ingraham – Lafitte; or, the Pirate of the Gulf – Captain Kid; or, The
Wizard of the Sea
 Gothic romance
o EDEN Southworth – The Curse of Clifton, The Hidden Hand
o Caroline Lee Hentz – Linda, The Planter's Northern Bride
 the poetry of 1830 to 1860 seldom breaks the mould of British tradition
o Meek, Cooke, Legare
 faithful expression of the region's physical and moral characteristics

Civil War Southern Literature

1. an examination of Southern regional identity
2. a reliance on the South's literary resources rather than on those of New England or
Europe; chance to regional speech
Dominant genres:

1. the historical romances

2. the coarse, realistic sketches of the Old Southwest humorists
3. the speeches, editorials, diaries, letters, and memoirs/biographies
4. sentimental novels glamorizing battle and urging the honour of the cause
5. poetry – Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne

Post-civil War Southern Literature

 the need to defend Southern actions, to present Southern version of the war, to understand
Southern defeat, and to bridge the emotional chasm between the South and the North
 Sidney Lane – Marshes of Glynn
- The Science of English Verse – a book on how to write poetry
- sentimental, charming, and humorous stories of life in the antebellum South for a
Northern public
 John Esten Cooke – Hilt to Hilt
 Mary Boykin Chestnut – A Diary from Dixie
 Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Realism in Southern Literature (1890 – 1920)

- the forgotten decades and the dark night of Southern Literature
- the writing of the period failed to adequately reflect the region's experience
- Thomas Dixon – The Leopard's Spots, The Clansman, The Traitor

Myths and Stereotypes in and of the American South

The Southern domestic metaphor – everyone has an appropriate place and was happy in it

The South as a region burdened by its history (the slavery – "the peculiar institution")

o apologies: slavery was beneficial to the slaves – slaves had a higher standard of
living than other workers

The notion of a "house divided" – coined by Lincoln

- intertwined abolitions vs. proslavery and industrial vs. agrarian arguments

- gender statuses
- the North= the man – money, power, vote
- the South= the woman – weak, foolish, stubborn, sentimental

Southern Paternalism – the way a father behaves to his children (women, children, Native
American, African Americans) – physical, emotional, psychological control, disciplining, and
protection of the childlike groups
The Southern code of honour – a standard up to which Southern masculinity was defined
and measured

The plantation myth – the land of plantations – masters, belles, slaves, poor whites

- the purpose – emphasis on the aristocratic origins + apology for all inds of inequalities
in the South

The Cavalier myth – the South – settled by cavaliers, knights-adventurers

Southern male and female stereotypes

1. Southern planter – fashioned after the upper classes of England
2. White supremacist – intimidation and violence to prevent African Americans from
voting and from holding positions of power
3. Poor whites (white trash) – the poorest of white Southerners
4. Carpetbaggers – immoral Northern opportunists; idealistic reformers
5. Scalawags – native Southerners who collaborated with the Reconstruction regimes
6. Jim Crow – white person wearing blackface
7. The black rapist – panic about racial intermixture – preserving the white purity –
protecting white womanhood
8. The Confederate woman – Southern women took over the job of managing plantations
9. Dixie Madonna – wealthy Southern women helped manage the affairs of the family
plantations

Slave narratives
 dictated or self-authored testimonies of African American experience of human
bondage
 1830-1865 – the golden age of the slave narrative
 conceived and received as political propaganda and literary art, social history, and
moral philosophy
 it undermined
- plantation romance which celebrated the South in pastoral terms
- conservative and reactionary philosophers because slave narratives challenged
the class system
- theological dissertations – God's plan for the uplift zje heathen blacks
- ethnological tracts which talked about the blacks' nature to serve – slave
narratives criticize "the great primary truth" of black inferiority
 Moses Roper, Frederick Douglass
 William Wells Brown – Clotel – the first novel ever published by an African
American

Solomon Northup – 12 Years a Slave

Stereotypes:

 tragic mulatta stereotype – Emily

  a field hand – a regular slave
 Patsey – both a field hand and a sexual object

Solomon's masters – Ford – humane; Tibeats – poor white trash; Epps – financially between
the two

Poe's Detective Fiction

- "tales of ratiocination"
- ratiocination – detective reasoning, argumentation, syllogism

1. The Murders in the Rue Morgue – first detective story ever written
 locked-room story – not a suicide, no extraordinary death circumstances (e.g. break-
ins)
 a wild and angry orang-utan is the murderer
 motifs – police incompetence, newspaper sensationalism, ratiocination

2. The Mystery of Marie Roget

 real-life event: Mary Cecilia Rogers – assumed to be killed because of an abortion
attempt
 Poe's least successful story (not a plausible plot)
 motif – armchair detection

3. The Purloined Letter

 "his best story of ratiocination"
 we know exactly who is the criminal and how the crime was executed

Dupin (to dupe= to fool someone) was once a very rich man. He lives in a Gothic house with
his helper. The helper is the narrator and he serves at the medium in the story. We are under
the impression that Dupin is an objective observer (because he leads a secluded life), but he is
actually well-connected with the society. He is driven, among other things, by his egotism,
greed, loyalty (to the female person in question – possibly the Queen), and revenge against
Minister D.

Minister D. and Dupin could be the two sides of the same coin – both are thieves, poets,
mathematicians, manipulators, and above all, they are rivals. Interestingly, they share the
initial of their last names.

Clues that point the reader to the solution of the mystery:

1. Dupin says that the answer is "self evident, in plain sight"

2. He suggests making a re-search of the premises  the motif of police incompetence

Local Colour in Louisiana

- the writing produced in the American South between the end of the Civil War and the turn
of the century
- traits: story-telling, narrative character, character sketches
- occasionally used to denigrate the exceptional fiction of several turn-of-the-century
Southern female writers
- settings – plantations and mountains
- predictable social types:
1. Virginia – gentry and gentry-imitating African Americans
2. North Carolina – melancholy but self-respecting Tar Heels1
3. Georgia and Arkansas – a cracker (an amusing provincial)
4. Tennessee – a mountaineer
5. Louisiana – Creole
6. Kentucky – colonels and hillbillies
- Fox – The Little Shepard of Kingdom Come

Louisiana – historical material far more racy and challenging than the Old South

1. 2 centuries of Creole history

2. yellow-fever epidemics
3. quadroon balls
4. duels
5. the Code Noir
6. characters like Jean Lafitte, the pirate
- avoids the shallow idealism
- settings:
1. New Orleans – a polyglot city of all classes and customs – Spanish, Creole,
Acadian, African American (with gradations of field hand and house servants,
octoroon, quadroon, mulatto), Italian, etc.
2. French Acadian settlements – swamps and prairies
3. the Mississippi River
- George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin: Desiree's Baby

La Blanche – Desiree's double

 "as white as La Blanche's"

 blanche – white/blank  both have descriptive names
 their babies look similar (and they are half-brothers)

Desiree

 spends most of the time lying down

 lack of solidarity for people outside of her nuclear family: no other person she feels
connected to
 unconscious – unaware of people around her – the last one to realize the baby is
mixed, that Armand is raping the slaves; she spends her life in a state of either a dream
or a nightmare

1
Tar Heel is a nickname applied to the U.S. state of North Carolina and its inhabitants.
  subversive character – her decision to leave is her only act of rebellion  there is still
some hope that she survives in the bog
o until she left, she was limited – we don't know much about her, not even her
real name
o her name hints to her projecting of other people's desires
o she also loses the Valmond name through marriage

The Fairy Tale Analogy

 The Valmonds – King and Queen who get a child under weird circumstances
 Desiree is the idol of Valmond
 Armand in Prince Charming
 the reader is under impression that they will live happily ever after

The motif of love

 stereotypical – developed at first sight

 connected to racism (very racist): "the girl's obscure origin" (she was found at the gate
of a plantation) foreshadows the racism
 black and white in the story: slaves and owners; good and evil
 Armand's father had to go to France to be able to get married to his slave. But Armand
is not like his father and he would not tolerate Desiree's being black. The final plot
twist, in which we find out that Armand is actually the black one from the two,
represents poetic justice.
 Armand is lead by instincts and he is very changeable – we observe his change for the
better when he is happily married to Desiree, but the change is only temporary.

Armand

 his racism is culturally transmitted

 possibly, he remembers his mother (remembers that she was black) and this is why he
tries to repress his 'blackness' by emphasising the difference between him as an owner
and the slaves
 possibly married Desiree because he needed a scapegoat – since her origin is
unknown, if their baby turned out half-black (which it did), he could blame it on her
and keep up the pretence that he is white
 his decisions are the law and there is no argument between Armand and Desiree when
he tells her she is black
 he is happy to have a child "chiefly because it's a boy"

Plantation Fiction
- 1936 – the publishing of Gone with the Wind – most famous representation of plantation
fiction
- Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Absalom, Absalom
- basic ingredients:
 the hills and fields
 the columned mansion
 the moonlight and magnolias
 the courtly master and his family taking their ease on the veranda
 contented black retainers (slaves) filling the evening air with song
- traits
 a version of the literary pastoral – a world innocent of politics
 ideological and political
 about the ownership of land and some threat (change or loss) to the owner's quiet
enjoyment of it
 an issue of social order (the essential rightness of slavery as a system of labour and a
morally appropriate condition for Americans
 the founding of the plantation and the creation of slavery
 the voices of black characters are heard

Antebellum plantation fiction

two traditions: plantation fiction and abolitionist polemic

- William Byrd II
- Tucker – The Valley of Shenandoah
- Kennedy – Swallow Barn
- Beverly Tucker – The Partisan Leader
- Gilmore Simms – Woodcraft

Anti-plantation – Uncle Tom's Cabin – H. Beecher Stowe

- presented the characters as they really are

- the whites - less villains than victims (victims of their love of leisure)
- slaves are in constant danger of being sold

Postbellum plantation fiction

- no need to reply of every abolitionist charge or to defend the institution of slavery
- the belief that their civilization had been worth all the sacrifices made in its defence
- a tone of nostalgia
- the voice of the black slaves – to authenticate a version of the plantation system as a
tragic Eden
- appealing to Northern and Southern readers
- helping in reconciliation

Thomas Nelson Page – In Ole Virginia

Joel Chandler Harris – Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings

Charles W. Chesnutt – The Conjure Woman

Margaret Mitchell – Gone With the Wind

 Scarlett breaks many social norms (e.g. by working in the field, in the lumber mill).
Her character deconstructs the Southern Belle stereotype in the very first sentence.
 Dixie Madonna stereotype – a woman always in the background, compared to the
Virgin Mary and called a 'true woman' – Ellen O'Hara and Melanie
 Southern gentleman stereotype
o the twins – amusing provincials (crackers) – always gambling, drinking,
hunting – this is the new type of gentleman
o the older type – Ashley – hails from Virginia; is interested in culture, fine arts,
literature; prominent sensitivity

The novel emphasizes the friendly relationship with the slaves (the twins growing up with
Jeems). The author introduces 'black aristocracy', represented by house servants and Mammy
in particular – she is said to be prouder than her masters and she resents the slaves owned by
poor white masters. The field hands are made to seem evil, lower-class (among the slaves),
and childlike. In this we see the demonization of the blacks and the field hands; the
Northerners are also demonized. The novel tries to present slavery as a system based on class,
not on race (meritocracy).

Southern African American Literature

Historical survey:

- slave narratives
- Brown's Clotel – first novel written by an African American
 Clotel – illegitimate daughter of Thomas Jeffrson – a tragic mulatta
- Frederick Douglass – The Heroic Slave
- Frances Harper – the first Southern African American woman writer – Iola LeRoy
- orator poets
o George Moses Horton – Hope of Liberty
o Albery Allson Whitman – Not a Man, And Yet a Man, The Rape of Florida
o Charles Chesnutt – House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition
o James Weldon Johnson – Negro National Anthem, Autobiography of an Ex-
Coloured Man
- the emergence of a New Negro – a new sort of socio-cultural consciousness with the
emphasis on cultural heritage – the New Negro Renaissance
 black art and literature as political instruments promoting African American
unity – Walter White, Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God),
Sterling Brown

Richard Wright – The Ethics of Living Jim Crow

 a shortened version of Wright's biography
 education is reserved for white people (white man, mostly)
  black men were not allowed to protect their women  emasculation of blacks is a
special form of racism
 the whites do not fear punishment for their actions

Richard Wright – Big Boy Leaves Home

- the white woman who thinks that she is about to get raped is both a victim and a
victimizer; the scene is an instance of black rapist myth (mass hysteria because of
racial intermixture)
- racial segregation is visible in the motif of the swimming hole, near which a sign
saying NO TRESPASSING is positioned. Other motifs are the barbed wire fence and the
fact that they were in a 'very dark part of the forest'
- major main idea: the birth of militant racial consciousness (Big Boy skips school, and
the school is the place of Jim Crow legislation – first act of defiance; the second one is
the killing of the white man Jim (!) Harvey

symbolism:

 train – represents the only two options Big Boy (and any other black person) has –
going to the North, to freedom, or dying
o the train whistles – 'a train bound to glory'
 the hostile nature, which supports white supremacy
o animals try to hurt Big Boy (the snake and the dog) – the motif of the snake
also has sexual background
o water – it's tempting to the boys and represents an object of desire
 it's cold, muddy, and evil
 Buck falls into the water when he is shot
 the water in front of Big Boy's house is evil – greasy and slippery
 thirst – not good
 water (rain) helps mob lynch Bobo (it stops raining when they burn
him)
 after Big Boy finally drinks, the cold water burns him inside
 the kiln – represents the womb – when he leaves the kiln, it represents
him cutting ties with his family
 another motif of leaving the family is the corn bread, which Big Boy
hugs to his chest – he didn't want to start eating it before escaping

the songs – their purpose is to introduce us to the characters

1. the nonsense song – yo mamma's undergarment's washed in alcohol – shows that they
are teenagers, having fun instead of being in school; they like gruff humour; it also
establishes Big Boy as the leader
2. the spiritual song – symbolism of the train (see above)
3. by and by I wanna piece of pie – they are hungry and unsatisfied; in search of
entertainment
4. the white mob's lynching song – racist
images

 lynching – smell, hearing (olfactory, auditory)

 water – cold, burning (tactile)
 no trespassing – visual

Southern Gothic
- literary influences – the antebellum plantation Gothic romance and the cosmic stories
of the Old Southwest
- uses Gothic traits such as:
 the setting in an ancestral house
 real or imagined occult, supernatural, or unusual events
 a suffering woman who discovers a serious secret
- although grotesque and critical in essence, does not lack an ever-present touch of
stubborn optimism
- offers an insight into the inhumanity of Southern society which opresses or ostracizes
marginalized groups (African Americans, Native Americans, women, homosexuals)
- reacts against the current ideologies and myths of the era

Influences
1. the ideology of Southern regionalism
a. the manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930)
- agrarian vs. industrial
b. initiated a similar literary movement known as Southern Renaissance
2. Demythologization of the South
- the South as the American margin or 'other'
- economic ('colonization') and cultural-social ('depiction of the South as
slavery')

Faulkner and Southern Gothic

Time in Faulkner's Southern Gothic fiction
- based on the well-known model of Southern history consisting of 3 phases – the Old
South, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the New South
- even though Faulkner did feel nostalgia for the Old South, he did not idealize the
plantation myth or the plantation aristocracy
- approached the Civil War from the home front perspective
- reconstruction – the most problematic period in his work
- his New South becomes home for a class in growth and refuge for white and black
share croppers

Place in Faulkner's Southern Gothic fiction

- Yoknapatawpha County – created upon the model of Faulkner's native Lafayette
County in Mississippi
 - the name comes from a Native American word
- home of many recognizable Faulkner's families: McCaslins, Compsons, Sartorises,
Snopeses, Burdens, ...

The Idea of Race

- race as he social and economic construct
- his work is dominated by the idea of guilt and debt that pursues the Southern concept
of race
- the slavery is, for him, a curse that affected both the land and the people
- sees racism as a reward given to poor whites by upper classes to lessen social
inequality

The Motif of Hurt Woman

- the woman is generally being hurt by a dominant other – sometimes by a male
character, sometimes by the community at large, and sometimes by the audience of the
story
- she can neither escape gender subordination imposed on women in patriarchal
societies, nor prevent harassment

Themes, Ideas, Motifs

- "whiteness" as a property ideology:
1. the development of the sense of white unity
2. the white male bonding
3. the new distribution of power after the Civil War which led to the redefinition
of Southern race idenitity
4. new ways to 'put African Americans in their place'
- the instruments of 'whiteness' as a property ideology:
 white supremacy
 the concept of a 'white nigger'
 the rigid system of gender roles
 the myth of the black rapist
- the black rapist myth:
1. the Southern whites' fears about racial intermixture and their obsession with
the racial purity of white womanhood
2. to retain control
3. to cushion the increasing social divisions between whites and to reinforce
white solidarity
4. Southern whites' anxieties and obsessions with respect to sex ('sanctified' two
Southern myths)

William Faulkner – Light in August

 reconstruction of the black rapist myth: Joanna wasn't rape by Joe, she willingly
participated in their relationship
 Joanna is a subversion of stereotypical gender role:
o she has a job
 o she is not a wife or a mother
o she willingly participates in the black rapist myth
o before Joe she was a spinster; after she is killed, the society 'likes' her again

Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire

Gothic elements:

 an ancestral house – Belle Reve – symbol of the old South; the name Belle Reve
means 'beautiful dream'  Blanche's beautiful dream (of a loving marriage) gets
ruined
 Blanche – a hurt woman; she violates social norms (has to leave her job because of an
indecent relationship with an underage boy
 obscure supernatural elements/events – the blue piano; the Varsouviana polka; the
Mexian woman (eerily offers las flores por muertes); the rape

Blanche – impulsive; Stella – timid, submissive, 'mandependant'; They have the same
upbringing, but different personalities. Still, they are both unstable, trapped in their situations,
and influenced by their illusions

- parallel scenes: 1-4 (Stanley as a caveman); 2-10 (seduction)

Blanche DuBois

 Blanche – white  emotion, innocence (female traits)

 DuBois – woods  phallic symbol (see below), wood-pen-her being a teacher (male
traits)
 French origin – glory of the Old South + epic fornications of her ancestors and the
burden of slavery

Stanley Kowalski

 figure of the American Dream, outmarriage (marries up, out of his class); America as
the melting pot
 has traits of an African American – author's compensation for the lack of black
characters
 his reasons for raping Blanche – he found her attractive; Stella wasn't home; Blanche
was already (considered?) mad, so no one would believe her; to show her he is
superior to her; she has to pay (in one way or another) for the food and shelter he had
been providing; believes he is saving his marriage
 he considers everything in terms of sexuality – their marriage is completely based on
sex

Sexual symbols

 Stanley throws his meat at Stella

 he bowls – and is the best at bowling
  Belle Reve – a big house with columns (phallic symbol) – Stanley inquires what
happens to it
 Blanche is an astrological Virgo – irony
 coke is spilled on Blanche's white dress – stain on her chastity
 the buttons on her dress
 a drag on the cigar
 an open trunk
 Symbolism of light and Blanche's covering up the lamp – her age, love, illusions, and
the past

Flannery O'Connor – A Good Man is Hard to Find

 title taken from a song, popularized by Bessie Smith

Catholic symbolism – the Tower (from the Old Testament); the Misfit could have been a
prophet; the Holy Trinity; God/Jesus/a believer – a good man that is hard to find; the
Grandmother, like Peter, denies 3 times

Symbols

 the monkey – the sinful soul of the man = greed, sin, malice; self-centered, eats his
own fleas
 parrots on Bailey's shirt – a parrot only repeats what it hears
 the blue shirt – Bailey's blue eyes
 yellow (parrots) – colour of fear

South in the 50s:

1. Stone Mountain – a monument to famous Southerners; 2 it's fading away, no longer a

tourist attraction
2. the little black boy – a pickaninny – "Little nigger in the country don't have things like
we do."  racism is still present and the grandma isn't sympathetic
3. the graveyard (5-6 graves) – foreshadows their deaths; the graveyard is a part of a
plantation that had gone with the wind; represents the nostalgia and the death of the
Old South
4. shapes of the clouds – John Wesley picks a cow-shaped cloud, June Star guesses right,
but John Wesley changes the correct answer from a cow to a car  Southern
agriculture giving place to Northern industry
5. telling a story about Mr. Teagarden – shows what a 'good man' means to the
Grandmother; Teagarden bought Coca Cola stocks (Cola is a Southern product!)
which symbolises the rise of consumerism and commercialism
6. the Tower – again, a symbol of commercialism; the song that is playing – the
Tennessee Waltz – the only link to the South

2
The carving depicts three Confederate figures during the Civil War: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and
Jefferson Davis. Stone Mountain was once owned by the Venable Brothers and was the site of the founding of
the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915. It was purchased by the State of Georgia in 1958.
Alice Walker – Everyday Use
biographical elements:

 mama – based on Walker's mother, to whom gender was not a barrier that prevented
her from doing anything: she worked in the field and around the house, like Mama did,
and indulged in creative art (gardening), whereas Mama does quilting
 Maggie – young Alice Walker – Walker lost her eye because of an accident
 Dee – educated and civil-rights movement Alice Walker – appreciates art in a
superficial way

black women bonding while quilting – not only familiar, but cultural history; quilting and
singing are a way to creatively express oneself

Maggie and Dee – the story of Cain and Abel, and the prodigal daughter (as opposed to a son)
who doesn't get the spiritual/non-materialistic family inheritance (as opposed to a son getting
materialistic inheritance)

 meaning of (not) being able to look a white man (or any man) in the eye – oppression
of black people
 Maggie's fire scars – symbol of slavery