CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS: THE MOTIF OF FOOD IN APPALACHIAN LITERATURE by CYNTHIA L. SIBLEY THAYER Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2010 Copyright © by Cynthia L. Sibley Thayer 2010 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee members, Tim Morris, Lewis Baker, and Ken Roemer, for their encouragement, notes, and willingness to read this manuscript as many times as needed. Although not an English major when I began my bachelor‘s degree, when I entered the English department at UTA I quickly realized my career goals changed. I enjoyed those undergraduate classes so much and knew that I wanted to teach English. Thanks also must go to my family. My parents, Mac and Linda Sibley, not only contributed monetarily to all of my degrees but their love and support has always been without fail. Without Mom‘s nagging to write about her family in some way and then to hurry and finish the manuscript, I could have floundered around for ten more years! Although passionate about my family in the hills, I am and will always be, a ―foreigner‖ in their eyes and I have Dad to thank for that! I must also thank Grandma Malvery Roberts Begley for her stories and her willingness to take me to places in eastern Kentucky where I could not go alone. I want to thank my husband, Kevin Thayer, for his patience and love while taking classes at night, staying up to read required texts, and letting me gallivant around eastern Kentucky with the folks while he stayed at home taking care of things. There is nothing I have written that Kevin has not read. He is the second person who touches every piece of writing I produce, and I know it is not a lot of fun for him. I appreciate him more than he will ever know. October 21, 2010 iii ABSTRACT CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS: THE MOTIF OF FOOD IN APPALACHIAN LITERATURE Cynthia L. Sibley Thayer, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2010 Supervising Professor: Tim Morris Food is an important element of literature. It can help to establish setting, conflicts, a hero and heroine, relationships with nature and other humans, comfort to readers as well as characters in fictional texts, class structure, and survival of a culture. For the reader, Appalachian literature invokes a sense of home, memories, and family. Appalachian food is also a catalyst for infamous stereotyping of the culture in the United States. The names of Hawthorne and Thoreau represent New England; Twain and Faulkner represent the South; and authors like Robert Morgan, Silas House, and Charles Frazier represent Appalachia putting it on the literary map to become canonical and studied outside of its own region with the appeal of not only the pastoral setting, but also the quality of hero and the memories provided by the details in the preservation and preparation of the food. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the different aspects of the food motif frequently appearing in Appalachian literature: the struggle of the hero to grow and iv hunt food as seen in novels such as The Dollmaker, Cold Mountain, Gap Creek, The Kentuckians, A Parchment of Leaves, and Jayber Crow; relationships surrounding the production or eating of food seen in the same novels, but also in memoirs such as Growing Up Hard In Harlan County and Addie: A Memoir; and stereotypes derived from certain types of Appalachian foods as illustrated not only in short stories from Chris Offut and Chris Holbrook, but also in articles in anthologies such as Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, White Trash: Race and Class in America, and Food and Culture: A Reader. This dissertation will also address larger elements in relation to food and its production such as coal, timber, and moonshine production, as well as the importance of salt to an agrarian society, using texts such as Salt: A World History, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, The United States of Appalachia, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945, and Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South. While researching, I gained momentum reading such texts as Salt like Food In History, Kitchen Literacy, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, and Food Is Culture because each validated what I was finding in the fictional texts. Furthermore, these authors had studied food, or elements of food production, in ways that allowed me to apply my chosen Appalachian texts to predetermined food theories such as the importance of salt and the adoration of sugar - the food binary that became thematic. Food is one of the most defining characteristics of Appalachian literature and as important as Appalachia‘s geography and history in placing a text in this region of America. Another purpose of this dissertation is to insure that homage is given to the mountain people who have maintained the skills of food production and cooking as demonstrated in Foodways, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine, The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, and Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes. Chapter Eight expresses the homage in the form of a personal reflection of v stories and experiences I have gathered while researching. It explains the origin of my commitment to this topic and hopefully demonstrates the respect I have for my family history and the people of the Appalachians. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................ iii ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................... iv Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………..………..….. ..................................... 1 2. GENDER ROLES............................................................................................................ 9 2.1 The Appalachian Hero ..................................................................................... 9 2.2 The Appalachian Heroine .............................................................................. 19 3. RELATIONSHIPS ........................................................................................................ 36 3.1 The Mountain Hero and the Land .................................................................. 37 3.2 The Mountain Hero and Hunting/Fishing ....................................................... 49 3.3 The Mountain Hero and His Tools ................................................................. 54 3.4 The Mountain Hero and His Still .................................................................... 60 3.5 The Mountain Hero and His Animals ............................................................. 63 4. FOOD AND COMMUNITY ........................................................................................... 80 5. FOOD AND SURVIVAL ............................................................................................. 102 5.1 Bartering ...................................................................................................... 103 5.2 When the Land Is Not Enough ..................................................................... 107 5.3 Abandoning the Hills .................................................................................... 118 5.4 The Hills Revolt ............................................................................................ 121 5.5 Homesickness, Comfort, and Freedom ....................................................... 124 5.6 Assimilation .................................................................................................. 140 6. HILLBILLY FOOD ...................................................................................................... 156 vii 6.1 Class and Food ............................................................................................ 156 6.2 Cultural Influences Found in Appalachia ..................................................... 161 6.3 Food Preservation and Preparation ............................................................. 167 7. STEREOTYPES ........................................................................................................ 185 8. PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ..................................................................................... 206 9. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 227 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 229 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ................................................................................................ 236 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Food is symbolic of many things in literary history. With the inception of the realistic novel post Civil War, food has been a recurring theme representing specific regions and its people. Just as Sarah Orne Jewett created a scenic Maine, Mark Twain propagated a southern dialect, and Bret Harte accurately portrayed the Old West, Appalachian writers have used food and its production as the central theme in literature. Regardless of historical placement throughout the last four centuries, Appalachian texts tend to rely on the production of food in the mountain regions to symbolize success for the people in that region, various types of relationships, survival of a culture,