During a Penguin Online Auditorium conversation with college students in 1999, Dorothy Allison described her novel Bastard Out of Carolina as a “story about a working class family, people who are trying very hard to take loving care of each other and who are failing again and again.”
Living in rural Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1950s, this family consists of Anney Boatwright; her second husband, Glen Waddell; her two daughters, Ruth Anne and Reese; and a host of beer-drinking, shotgun-toting uncles and aunts who marry young, have many children, and age before their time.
Allison’s focus in this mix of characters is Ruth Anne, nicknamed Bone, and “certified a Bastard by the State of Carolina” (Penguin Online, 3). Bone narrates incidents about her family with an observant eye and an understanding of human behavior beyond her years, as she struggles to discover the way her mother’s upbringing affects her own role as a Boatwright.
“Family is family, but even love can’t keep people from eating at each other,” Bone says.
Despite her understanding of her family history, Bone has trouble placing herself within it because she “didn’t look like anybody at all” (30). Her search for a stronger sense of identity becomes a significant theme of the novel as Bone increasingly yearns for a different, less oppressive future than her mother’s. She hopes to rise above the poverty that causes much of the instability in her family, and she wants choices for her future.
Bone’s future happiness is curtailed, however, by her stepfather, “Daddy Glen.” Glen is obsessive over Bone’s mother, Anney, and jealous of the attention she pays her girls. One aunt says of Glen, “He loves [Anney] like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up” (41). While there is plenty of evidence to suggest to Bone (and readers) that Glen is trouble, Anney can see no wrong in him. Bone says of her mother, who lost her first husband in an accident, “She wanted someone strong to love her like she loved her girls” (10). Anney gets her man, but at a severe cost when Glen begins to take out his aggressions on Bone.
Being told by others that she lacks the beauty of her mother and other Boatwright women in their youth, Bone already feels ugly and uncomfortable in her skin when Daddy Glen routinely abuses her physically and sexually. Critic Brenda Boudreau explains that Bone’s body “reflects various cultural attitudes and values about the body, as well as being constructed by them; her body becomes a literal battlefield, the target for, and a means of, humiliation and control, particularly by men” (Boudreau, 45).
Glen first molests Bone in his truck outside the hospital while Anney is having his child. When the baby boy dies, Glen turns to drinking and tries to isolate Anney and the girls from the rest of the family. He becomes steadily more abusive toward Bone as he moves the family from one house to the next, just ahead of the bill collectors.
Feeling that the abuse she receives is her fault because she is ugly, or because “there was something I was doing wrong, something terrible,” Bone does not tell Anney about her increasingly more violent and more sexual encounters with Glen. Instead, she waits patiently for her mother’s love and loyalty toward her to win out over her feelings for Glen.
While Anney does leave Glen on a number of occasions, she always returns to him, providing a limited model for Bone, Boudreau says, that shows she is “destined to be used by the men around her” (52).
With each passing year, Bone’s resentment toward Glen and, increasingly, toward Anney continues to build, and her feelings are further complicated by her changing body. For Bone, adolescence is especially painful emotionally, a place of shame instead of wonder because of the more frequent abuse she suffers from Glen. During this time, Bone repeatedly masturbates to fantasies of death and violence. She imagines Glen beating her while others look on, and she is ashamed of the rush of sexual excitement these images bring.
Bone also finds relief from the horrors of her home life through telling gruesome, made-up stories to the neighborhood children, living with various aunts for months at a time, and escaping into the soothing sounds of gospel music and the attention she gains for wanting to be saved in the 14 different Baptist churches she attends.
She cannot, however, escape the evidence of Glen’s abuse, nor Anney’s protection of him, forever. When Bone’s Aunt Raylene discovers the girl’s bruises from a recent beating, Anney insists Glen loves Bone and would never hurt her. Wanting to please her mother, Bone agrees that this latest round of abuse was her fault, that she made Glen mad.
After this incident, Anney goes with Bone to live with her Aunt Alma who has just lost a baby, but she begins to retreat emotionally from Bone. Sensing once and for all where her mother’s loyalties lie, Bone decides she will not return to Daddy Glen’s house should Anney choose to return there, as she soon does.
When Bone finally stands up to Glen at age 13, her actions lead to a final, violent and shocking confrontation. The scene becomes an ultimate test of family love and loyalty when Anney witnesses Glen’s brutality and sees him as the abuser Bone has known all along. The choice Anney next makes is not surprising, considering a family history of women who always return to their men, but in the moment of abandonment, Bone discovers the identity she has been seeking: “I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman” (309).
While the novel ends with Bone’s new sense of identity, one can argue that Bone embraces her identity throughout the novel. Critic Renee R. Curry suggests that Bone claims her identity, her “I,” by simply telling her story. As an incest survivor, Bone’s perspective is an important one in our society. She is evidence that, as Curry says, “Girls do not live innocently, and they do not narrate the world innocently when they are allowed to narrate. Furthermore, they will point to the lack of innocence in others” (103).
In discussing Bone as a narrator, Allison adds that she is “a particular kind of wise adolescent narrator. She’s not a trustworthy narrator. She genuinely doesn’t understand some of the things that happen; she’s secretive, she deliberately misunderstands and misrepresents some of what she can’t stand” (Penguin Online).
What emerges from this narration, however, is a treatment of incest and family violence that Allison says she had never seen expressed in other novels. “The people I most want to read this book are adolescents in crisis,” Allison explains (Penguin Online), people who can relate to Bone’s “enormous anger and contempt for herself” and come to realize that what happens to Bone is not her fault.
Sources
- Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 1992.
- Baker, Moira Press. “The Politics of They: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina as Critique of Class, Gender, and Sexual Ideologies.” In The World Is Our Culture: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and Nancy Summers, 117–141. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
- Boudreau, Brenda. “The Battleground of the Adolescent Girl’s Body.” In The Girl: Construction of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women, edited by Ruth O. Saxton, 43–56. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
- Curry, Renee R. “‘I Ain’t No Friggin’ Little Wimp’: The Girl Narrator in Contemporary Fiction.” In The Girl: Construction of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women, edited by Ruth O. Saxton, 95–105. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
- Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001.
- Gwin, Minrose. “Nonfelicitous Space and Survivor Discourse: Reading the Incest Story in Southern Women’s Fiction.” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, 416–440. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
- Penguin Online Auditorium. “Chat with Dorothy Allison.” November 9, 1999. (Web site restricted to members.)
- Sandell, Jillian. “Telling Stories of ‘Queer White Trash’: Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Work of Dorothy Allison.” In White Trash: Race and Class in America, edited by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, 211–230. New York: Routledge, 1997.
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