A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor

Abstract

Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor have all acknowledged in one way or another ugliness that saturates their fictional worlds, an ugliness that is so frequently embodied--literally--in their female characters. (1) In this essay, I concentrate on those texts which are most readily recognized as grotesque--Welty's A Curtain of Green, McCullers' The Ballad of Sad Cafe, and O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find (2)--in order to reinvigorate an understanding of a peculiarly southern form of ugliness. Concentrating on female grotesques, I want to suggest that these freakish women that so loudly dominate these stories engage in a politics of dissent. And this occurs on two levels. Firstly, raucous women in Welty's, McCullers', and O'Connor's fiction challenge idealised and, needless to say, oppressive visions of white southern womanhood--the southern lady and southern belle--that have dominated southern gender regimes from antebellum period right up to present. Secondly, contorted and fragmented bodies that fill these writers' stories at same time own up to a tragic history in which they have partaken, even if in silence. Such a history not only revolves around burdensome models of femininity, but also slavery and its tragic legacy and a literally fatal regional patriotism, and it becomes marked on bodies of Welty's, McCullers', and O'Connor's women, just as spidery scars on Seth's back write over and over violent history of slavery and racism in Toni Morrison's Beloved. First we must ponder why it is female body in particular that has become a contested site of southern history and politics. Anne Goodwyn Jones stresses importance of female body in southern culture: body of privileged white woman was revered as a marble statue, a Grecian urn, a human body that by nature resembled finest productions of masculine art. As such, it needed protection from vandals.... [F]or white men, this image implied purity of blood and thus of white patriarchal lineage: white supremacy a [sic] well as male line of succession and inheritance were guaranteed by chastity and desirelessness.... Dividing women into categories--black and white, lady and woman--was one way to maintain a sense of control.... The white woman's fragility further guaranteed distance from earthy interests and gave man an opportunity to construct his own manhood in protecting her. (3) Jones' account is insightful. While southern white woman's value was invested in body, she was at same time dis-embodied: her fragility further guaranteed distance from earthy interests. Her position is thus a tortured one, torn between image and reality. Elsewhere, Jones includes two accounts from first decades of twentieth century that further attest to foregrounding of women's bodies in southern culture. One clergyman warned of dangers of antithesis of southern lady and belle, that is, a new northern style of woman, who had developed hands, bigger feet, higher cheek bones, lanker limbs, flatter chests, hook noses, lips thin and tight. Here, movement away from feminine ideal transforms a female body into an androgynous, sterile one, type of ugly body we frequently encounter in Welty's, McCullers' and O'Connor's fiction. Another observer remarked that the rapidity with which [white southern] women have aged in past, their invalidism, mental breakdown and early death have been in part because of strain of concealing irritation that was not permitted self-expression. (4) Once more, painful experience of southern womanhood is lived on and marks body. Historians now generally acknowledge that ideal of southern womanhood has always been bound up with south's particular relationship to race. (5) Even as recently as Civil Rights Movement, conservatives appealed to this ideal in order to resist changes to insidious system of Jim Crow. …