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Trashed: the Myth of the Southern Poor White Trashed: the Myth of the Southern Poor White University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 12-2014 Trashed: The yM th of the Southern Poor White April Elizabeth Thompson University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Thompson, April Elizabeth, "Trashed: The yM th of the Southern Poor White" (2014). Theses and Dissertations. 2116. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/2116 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Trashed: The Myth of the Southern Poor White Trashed: The Myth of the Southern Poor White A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by April Thompson Western Kentucky University Bachelor of Arts in English, 2000 Western Kentucky University Master of Arts in English, 2001 December 2014 University of Arkansas This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. __________________________________ Dr. Susan Marren Dissertation Director __________________________________ __________________________________ Dr. Lisa Hinrichsen, Dr. Robert Cochran, Committee Member Committee Member Abstract The fact of class has been a powerful tool in the process of identity formation, particularly in the American South, which has been viewed as a region apart from the national imaginary. To counter this exclusion, Southerners have often relied on stereotypes. One of the most prevalent and tragic of these is the stereotype of poor white trash, a construction that has been utilized to insist upon elite white Southerners’ exceptionalism and innocence and to assert their rightful place in American historiography. While it is difficult to calculate their level of success, as perceptions of the region have varied through the decades, the destructive power of white trash cannot be disputed. This work utilizes a number of texts to demonstrate the myriad ways in which white trash, a relatively static construction of undesirable attitudes and beliefs since the antebellum era, has nonetheless been adapted to promote disparate agendas. At the same time, I explore the impact of the epithet on poor whites themselves, examining the stereotype’s deleterious effects upon the economically disadvantaged and politically powerless. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe uses the threat of upper-class contamination by white trash to expose the ills of slavery. Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition demonstrates the displacement of the nation’s long and shameful history of African- American disfranchisement onto white trash. In his Snopes trilogy, William Faulkner attempts to negotiate Southern past and present through white trash’s intrusion on civilized society. Erskine Caldwell tries to shed light on poor white oppression, but his Tobacco Road is too steeped in stereotype to prove his assertions. In Deliverance, James Dickey fashions white trash monsters to exacerbate middle-class fears of poor white mobility, and Harry Crews’s A Childhood: The Biography of a Place examines the poor white’s initial resistance but ultimate resignation to the limiting functions of the stereotype. A hopeful shift in poor white depictions occurs in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Amy Greene’s Bloodroot, two works which seek to confront the stereotype and call for a reevaluation of the beliefs and practices that have suppressed poor whites for centuries. © 2014 by April Thompson All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements Over the past four years I have received a wealth of support and advice from my dissertation committee. It is with sincere gratitude that I acknowledge Dr. Susan Marren, Dr. Lisa Hinrichsen, and Dr. Robert Cochran for their direction as I moved from abstract concept to firmly developed conviction. Dedication This work is dedicated to my parents, David and June Thompson, and my husband, Paul Young, with all of my gratitude and love. Table of Contents Introduction: White Trashing…………………………………………………………….………..1 Chapter One: The Myth of White Trash: Antebellum Beginnings, Impossible Endings? ..........25 Chapter Two: Minority Myth-Making………………………….……………………..…………62 Chapter Three: Renaissance and Depression-Era Myth-Makers: Faulkner and Caldwell as Reluctant Historians…………………………………………………..……………….………..101 Chapter Four: Facing the Stereotype: James Dickey and Harry Crews Battle the White Trash Inside……………………………………………………………………………………………144 Chapter Five: Twenty-First Century Trash: Confronting the Stereotype………………………181 Where are We Going? The Future of Trash…………………………………………………….222 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...……………..229 1 Introduction: White Trashing In a scene from “Appalachian ER,” a recurring skit on Saturday Night Live, a heavily pregnant young woman with missing teeth walks into a hospital complaining of bowel problems. When told she is expecting, the woman insists with an over-the-top twang that she just has gas. Moments later, a second patient, this time a heavy-lidded and equally toothless man in overalls, comes in to have a matchbox car removed from his rectum. In a comic drawl, the man asserts that he has accidentally sat on the foreign object—again. The live studio audience chuckles (dutifully or genuinely?) for the thousandth time at these worn-out stereotypes, but it is not just the punchlines they are laughing at: hillbillies, rednecks, yokels—white trash—are inherently funny. But the humor is foregrounded in an ugly bias against this massive lower class: poor whites are naturally stupid, promiscuous, wily, and perverted. All that is missing from this episode is for the pregnant woman’s brother to step in and claim paternity. What this scene and many others share is their revelation of a society that has become completely desensitized to the detrimental effects of the poor white stereotype. For many Americans, in fact, this is what a typical Southerner looks and acts like, and this is due to the South’s obsession with creating myths about its history. So strong has been the influence of Southern myth-making that fiction has become reality, and all lower class whites can be defined by a set of undesirable and frequently humorous traits. But how did this occur? In order to understand this process, it is important to discover the ways in which the white trash stereotype developed. Americans began to construct myths almost before there was an America. When those first settlers set out to create a nation free of foreign rule, they were beset with many difficult questions. As they began to establish a framework of law and order with which to govern the burgeoning country, one of the most important questions, one that 2 would guide their actions and influence their decisions, was: What kind of history are we making? America’s Founding Fathers wrestled daily not only with the impacts of their decisions in their own times, but also with the ways in which their words and deeds would be interpreted by generations of future Americans. And so it was with the American South, which would be double-plagued by its status as both within and outside of the nation-at-large. In Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (2005), James C. Cobb notes that even in the nation’s infancy, the role of the South in American identity formation was relegated to a state of Otherness, with the Northern states defining themselves in opposition to the South and claiming that their own superiority made them the true representatives of the American spirit (14). By the late 1700s, writings by William Byrd II, Thomas Jefferson, Dr. John Fothergill, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, and Royall Tyler had established the South as an inferior national space, one populated by lazy, indulgent, ignorant, and frequently criminal ne’er-do-wells, and during this era, Northern writers often “employed a first-person/third-person ‘we/they’ dichotomy in describing Southerners” (Away 14). Indeed, “[t]he inclination to present New England as both the moral and intellectual center of the new nation was a recurrent theme in early writing about the American character” (Away 15). This focus on sectionalizing the nation, on sustaining “‘a privileged national identity’ by consigning most of the undesirable traits exhibited by Americans to the ‘imagined space called the South’” (Jansson qtd in Away 3), set Southerners apart from the rest of the nation and excluded them from the process of American historiography. Southerners had little choice, then, but to create a history of their own, and this became especially difficult during the South’s dark days of slavery and secession. The South had been forced to contend with Northern criticism of its peculiar institution for close to a century, but by the Civil War, the history of America was 3 indisputably the history of the North, and “the North’s military triumph [in the war] further secured its role as the true symbol of American society” (Away 4). For the North, control of dominant American history afforded the comforting illusion that slavery, that blatant anomaly in republican and egalitarian America, had never been central to American culture but…only a marginal institution confined to the cultural peripheries of the colonial British American world. (Away
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