The Widow Sunday Katherine Conner
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2009 The Widow Sunday Katherine Conner 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 THE WIDOW SUNDAY By KATHERINE CONNER A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2009 The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Katherine Conner defended on April 20, 2009. __________________________________ Robert Olen Butler Professor Directing Dissertation __________________________________ Suzanne Sinke Outside Committee Member __________________________________ Julianna Baggott Committee Member __________________________________ Barry Faulk Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________ Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English The Graduate School has verified and approved the above7named committee mem er ii Dedicated to 5ichael G. Conner, 5ary Helen Conner, and all of my family. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The writer wishes to ac4nowledge the mem ers of her Committee, Ro ert Olen Butler, 6ulianna Baggott, Barry Faul4, and Su3anne Sin4e, for their help with the completion of this manuscript. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 1i THE GIRAFFE KEEPER ............................................................. 1 ON HIGHWAY 40 ....................................................................... 16 THE WIDOW SUNDAY .............................................................. 35 RIVERFEST ............................................................................... 53 PEOPLE DON’T SLEEP IN SU55ER ....................................... 67 BELHAVEN ................................................................................ 70 PANTHER STALKS HINDS COUNTY ........................................ 0. SCRAPS .................................................................................. 107 THE HIRED BOY @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@.. 1.3 BLOODY 0A ................................................................................. 136 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ......................................................... 150 v INTRODUCTION The collected stories in the dissertation manuscript, The Widow Sunday, are set primarily in 5ississippi, and present a south de1oid of reference to contemporary culture. The south of The Widow Sunday is timeless, a microcosm where the surreal leeds into the real, a place rife with the maca re and the ta oo. The collection’s concern with mor idity will, perhaps, encourage readers to align it with the Bsouthern gothic’ tradition, or as some critics define it, the Cgrotes(ueDBthe demented, the deformed, the (ueer’E F(uoted in Donaldson 567). And yet, to call the stories in The Widow Sunday Bsouthern gothic’ is to o1ersimplify a collection of fiction influenced y a di1erse ody of writers, from Emily Bronte to Toni 5orrison to Flannery O’Connor, a collection concerned not only with atmosphere, ut with o session, and with the inexplica le lure of the maca re. Too often do we categori3e southern fiction as Bsouthern gothic’ and too often do we ignore the asic differences etween the fiction of, for example, William Faul4ner and Flannery O’Connor, or William Gay and Cormac 5cCarthy, each with its own particular agendas and o sessionsDfrom the de1out Catholicism of an O’Connor story to Gay’s interest in the CGothic fairy taleE Fas he calls his story, CThe PaperhangerE). La eling fiction Bsouthern gothic’Dor Brealist’ or Bpostmodernist’ or anything else, for that matterDstamps it as C4nownE or Cunderstood.E But the eauty of literary fiction is that its meanings, its use of language and setting and character, can ne1er e fully 4nown, can ne1er e wholly understood. And yet, critics and readers ali4e continue to categori3e literature, perhaps ecause the need to understand, to figure out, is a part of our 1ery nature. It is a need which the Gothic tradition itself has exploited for nearly three hundred years. The Gothic has always fed off our fear of the un4nownDor, in other words, what we cannot categori3e. 6udith Hal erstam, in her study Skin Shows, claims that the Gothic vi tradition has from its 1ery eginning mar4ed Ca peculiarly modern preoccupation with oundaries and their collapseE FHal erstam .0). In her anthropological wor4 Purity and Danger, 5ary Douglas has further defined this lurring of oundaries as the Bimpure’ or Cthings that are interstitial, that cross the oundaries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual schemeE FDouglas cited in Carroll 55). We can further identify the Bimpure’ in o Iects or eings if CJthey areK . categorically incomplete, or formlessE FCarroll 55). Certainly the figure of the monster itself Fa figure which appears in much of the Gothic fiction of the late Victorian period) em odies this concern with C oundaries and their collapseE. The monster is always a hy rid, a half7 reed, a mongrel FFran4enstein’s creature remains, perhaps, the most classic exampleD oth li1ing and dead, animate and inanimate). But this transgression, this crossing of lines, is not limited to the figure of the monster alone. It extends, in fact, to the setting, the place, and the 1ery atmosphere in which the characters reathe. Prominent features of Gothic fiction are tum led7down mansions, ruined castles, ominous woods, Cmarginal, hidden, or a andoned sites, gra1eyards, sewers, or old houses J. .K en1irons outside of and un4nown to ordinary social lifeE FCarroll 57). And if it is this, finally, that ma4es a wor4 of fiction Gothic, then sure, we can call The Widow SundayDand its fascination with deformities, its horned woman, its corpses, its a andoned houses and dan4, deserted spacesDGothic. We find in the oo4 a fascination with transgression deeply rooted in the characters themsel1es, a fascination which theorist 6ulia Kriste1a would call Cthe a IectEDor, Cthat which does not Brespect orders, positions, rules’ and which Bdistur s identity, system, order’E FKriste1a (uoted in Hutchings 36). For Kriste1a, the a Iect Calso offers a source of fascination and desire, seducti1ely drawing our attention to the limits of our selfhood e1en as we see4 to distance oursel1es from that experienceE F36). In The Widow Sunday, this com ination of desire and disgust emerges o1er and o1er again. Nan, the main character in CScraps,E is so inexplica ly o sessed with the CimpureE that she collects fingernail clippings and hair clippings, o Iects which, Cinsofar as they figure am iguously in terms of categorical oppositions such as vii me/not me, inside/outside, and li1ing/dead, ser1e as ready candidates for a horrence as impureE FHutchings 55). 5illa, from the title story of the collection, finds that her 1ery identity hinges on possessing the Widow Sunday’s amputated horn. Caroline, in CThe Dancing Imps of Ri1erfest,E is so drawn to the un4nown that she ta4es to rooting out secrets, and disco1ers more than she is prepared to confront. It would seem, then, that The Widow SundayDaccording to the a o1e definition of the GothicDhas een strongly influenced y the genre. But what of the southern gothic in particularM How does this more recent su 7genre factor into a long7standing tradition of Gothic fiction, and what, finally, ma4es a wor4 of fiction Bsouthern gothic’ and not simply GothicM Its settingM No. Truman Capote, often deemed a Bsouthern gothic’ writer, set much of his wor4 in New Yor4 City, while Cormac 5cCarthy, also sometimes aligned with the genre, sets his fiction prominently in the western United States. But oth of these writers are originally from the south, so perhaps this is the 4eyM A (uic4 scan of such southern gothic anthologies as The Surreal South answers this (uestion, since the authors included are from all areas of the United States. It would seem, then, that one can write a out, e from, or currently li1e in the south to e classified as Bsouthern gothic.’ With a definition as road as this, one wonders what common ground readers may find in the ody of wor4 we call Bsouthern gothic.E Some identify it in the Cthemes of terror, death, and social interactionE FCSouthern GothicE ii.) that much of this fiction portrays. We ha1e esta lished, then, that for a wor4 of fiction to e classified Bsouthern gothic’ it must ha1e, in some loose way, a connection with the south, and it must also include something of CterrorE and mor idity and Csocial interaction.E All of this would seem to place The Widow Sunday neatly within the southern gothic genre. The stories are not only set in the south, ut are written y an author who currently li1es in the south and is also from the south. And many of the stories can e analy3ed in terms of Cterror, death, and social interactionED most nota ly CPanther Crosses Hinds CountyE, in which the main character’s mor id interest in death is placed front and center, and CBelha1enE in which the viii main character finds herself incapa le of any Bnormal’ interaction with her neigh or. But the a o1e definition of the Bsouthern gothic’ is so road that we could, if we tried, connect hundreds of no1els and stories to the genre, many of whose authors would recoil at such a connection. Eudora Welty is a nota le example. As author Susan Donaldson puts it, Cconsidering the stereotypes and the clichNs associated with Southern Gothic J. .K it’s (uite understanda le that Welty