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Gender and Sexual Violence in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Southern Fiction Cameron E

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Gender and Sexual Violence in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Southern Fiction Cameron E Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2014 "A Primitive and Frightening South": Gender and Sexual Violence in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Southern Fiction Cameron E. Williams Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “A PRIMITIVE AND FRIGHTENING SOUTH”: GENDER AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SOUTHERN FICTION By CAMERON E. WILLIAMS A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2014 Cameron Williams defended this dissertation on December 9, 2013. The members of the supervisory committee were: Timothy Parrish Professor Directing Dissertation Reinier Leushuis University Representative Celia Daileader Committee Member Diane Roberts Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION: “GOTHIC DOOM AND GLOOM”: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH ............................................................................................................................................1 1. E(RACE)ING FEMALE SEXUALITY: THE DISCOURSE OF INCEST AND REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMANHOOD IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY AND TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD .......................................................................................................11 “THE IMPULSE TO INCEST”: SOUTHERN FICTION’S FIXATION ...................12 THE “BLACKNESS” OF FEMALE SEXUALITY ....................................................15 THE SOUTHERN LADY: THE “LILY-PURE MAID OF ASTOLAT” ....................17 “HOT HIDDEN FURIOUS”: RACIALIZING CADDY COMPSON .........................19 MAYELLA EWELL’S INTERRACIAL TRANSGRESSION: “WHITE TRASH” SEXUALITY IN TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD ..........................................................32 2. “THE LAST TABOO”: RAPE AND MASCULINE EXPRESSION IN DELIVERANCE AND KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT ......................................................................49 “READING RAPE” IN SOUTHERN FICTION: THE CULTURE AND ITS COMPLEX ..................................................................................................................51 THE 1960S AND THE “NEW” THREAT TO SOUTHERN MANHOOD ...............57 ED, BOBBY, AND THE “PENALTY FOR SODOMY”: ENCOUNTERING “PRIMITIVE” MANHOOD IN DELIVERANCE .......................................................59 “OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SUNTAN OIL”: FORGING AN ALTERNATE MASCULINITY IN KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT .....................................76 3. LOVING THE PAST THAT IS DEAD: NECROPHILIA AND MASCULINITY IN CHILD OF GOD AND TWILIGHT ......................................................................................90 THE UNRELENTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST ..................................................92 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE (DON’T) TALK ABOUT NECROPHILIA .........................................................................................................100 “THEY SAY HE NEVER WAS RIGHT AFTER HIS DADDY KILLED HISSELF”: UNBURYING THE PAST IN LESTER BALLARD’S NECROPHILIC, GENDER- BENDING PRESENT ..............................................................................................105 “A MODEL OF SARTORIAL ELEGANCE”: THE NECROPHILIAC AS EFFETE ARISTOCRAT IN TWILIGHT ..................................................................................120 EPILOGUE: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND GENDER REPRESENTATION IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN CULTURE ...........................................................................130 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................137 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................149 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation interrogates the intersection of gender representation and sexual violence in twentieth and twenty-first-century Southern fiction. It looks specifically at incest, rape, and necrophilia, three forms of sexual violence that appear time and time again in the fiction of the region. These are forms of sexual violence that in fact have a long and storied place in the South’s narrative and cultural history. By exploring the South’s historical preoccupation with sexual violence, this dissertation reveals the extent to which these narratives of incest, rape, and necrophilia are tangled up with—and in some cases responsible for producing—the South’s ideas and myths about gender, as well as sexuality, race, and class. This dissertation argues, then, that Southern writers—William Faulkner, Harper Lee, James Dickey, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, and William Gay—in their treatments of sexual violence, engage images of Southern manhood and womanhood as a means of resisting, challenging, or complicating the South’s complex system of gender, sexual, class, and racial politics. Ultimately, this dissertation hopes to prove how these writers demonstrate an engagement with the South’s mythologies, and how even though these writers seem to want to push against them, they very often reaffirm their value. iv INTRODUCTION “GOTHIC DOOM AND GLOOM”: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH Mention “the South” and a catalogue of stereotypes typically comes to mind. More often than not, the South is considered wild, backwards, violent, perverse, and this is an image that a number of Southern writers, critics, and historians have helped to perpetuate. W. J. Cash, largely considered the defining historian of the South, terms the central theme of Southern culture “the Savage Ideal,” the determination of (white) male society to maintain those customs, traditions, and “routines of mind” that had been honored and passed down over the course of the South’s development. Influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea of the frontier as key to defining American society, Cash views individualism and self-reliance as certain values that are central to the Southern way of life. But Cash sees also what Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his introduction to The Mind of the South, calls the “darker aspects” of frontier life: violence, lawlessness, and crudeness, Cash claims, are an endemic part of Southern culture (xviii). In The Mind of the South, Cash describes the typical (male) Southerner as a violent “hell of a fellow,” an absolute romantic, but also a complete hedonist (45). C. Vann Woodward, though critical of Cash’s monolithic notion of the South, also looks to history to explain the myth behind the region. In The History of Southern Literature, Louis Rubin cites Woodward’s assertion that [t]he South’s distinctiveness is rooted in its having had a different historical experience from the nation at large: where America has known only success and affluence, the South has known failure, defeat, and poverty; where the nation has thrived on its myth of innocence, the South has experienced, in the awful burden of slavery, the reality of evil and a sense of guilt; where the country as a whole has been optimistic and secure in its progressivist creed, the South’s historical experience has generated pessimism in Southerners, an awareness of the limitations of the human condition, and a realization that everything one wants to do cannot be accomplished. (425) As Woodward points out, the South has a long history of violence, one that has indeed contributed to its association with what Teresa Goddu refers to as “gothic doom and gloom” (3). 1 Eudora Welty, one of the South’s most prominent women writers, when asked to comment on the use of violence in her own work, once said that “[w]ar, bloodshed, massacre were all a part of the times” (qtd. in Harrison 77). History, she claimed, “tells us worse things” than fiction, and certainly Southern history in particular seems even to tell us far worse things than American history in general. It seems banal to say that the time of slavery was one of the darkest and most violent periods in the South, but the extent of the horror and the lingering effects of this violent “peculiar institution” continue to be underestimated. Some sixty million slaves died during the period of American slavery; others were subjected to violent, brutal, and dehumanizing conditions. Few abuses were off-limits: beatings, hangings, imprisonment, even mutilations were not uncommon treatments. Female slaves were frequently subject to rape at the hands of their masters, and those who fled were punished severely. Equally violent were the efforts to fight the brutalities of slavery. Abolitionary activities—mostly illegal and aggressively suppressed by “the institutions of social coercion” of individual Southern states—such as Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, or John Brown’s infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, were repressed by violent legal action (Curry 315). Both Brown and Turner, only two examples of many attempts at rebellion, were taken alive, tried, and eventually executed. Only through a presidential proclamation in 1863 was slavery ultimately abolished, “a proclamation that was enforced by the federal government in the most costly,
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