History, Mothering, and Manhood in Mary Lee Settle’s The Beulah Quintet

Abstract

WENDY PEARCE MILLER University of North Carolina - Pembroke History, Mothering, and Manhood in Mary Lee Settle’s The Beulah Quintet CRITICS SUCH AS BRIAN ROSENBERG (110) AND JANE GENTRY VANCE (222) note the gradual burgeoning of female power in The Beulah Quintet,1 and they characterize the power shift as a positive phenomenon; I do not necessarily disagree with such an assessment. One glaring problem in the scant available discussion of gender in the quintet, however, is the lack of attention afforded Settle’s major male characters, because it is with these male characters that Settle (or, more appropriately, the narrative voice) most often sympathizes. Despite the quintet’s increasing privileging of the feminine in terms of narration, Settle repeatedly directs our attention toward the male characters and their deterioration. The increase in female power is directly proportional to the decrease in male power, and Settle emphasizes the negative effects of the power shift on characters of both sexes. That the subject of male gender construction should be overlooked in studies involving gender is not surprising. Despite a surge of interest in “masculinist studies” in the 1990s, as late as 1996 Anne Goodwyn Jones argued that “gender essentialism—the belief that gender differences are the result primarily of natural and biological, not social or cultural forces—still holds its own even today” (42). Jones further notes the dearth of scholarship on Southern manhood in general: “Even less has been done on the history of men and manhood in the twentieth-century South; the last pages of Ted Ownby’s Subduing Satan only begin to address the question” (48). Feminist theorists such as Jones herself have contributed much to the study of constructions of womanhood in Southern literature, but relatively little has changed in the past decade regarding the treatment 1 The Beulah Quintet is comprised of the following five books: Prisons (1973), O Beulah Land (1956), Know Nothing (1960), The Scapegoat (1980), and The Killing Ground (1982). These books could and should be considered one work, a work whose setting spans two countries and three hundred years, while depicting numerous generations of characters over a total of 1,621 pages. (My page count is taken from the 1996 editions of the books published by The University of South Carolina Press.) 46 Wendy Pearce Miller of gender construction and male characters. As masculinist theorist Judith Kegan Gardiner asserts, current feminist theories are . . . being changed by the insights of masculinity studies. At present, feminist-inflected masculinity studies have reached consensus about some previously troubling issues. Chief among these is the initial insight that masculinity, too, is a gender and therefore that men as well as women have undergone historical and cultural processes of gender formation. . . . (11) The topic of male gender formation is one that Settle is often concerned with; she acknowledges her “obsession” in an interview with John Crane in 1990. During the interview, Crane mentions what he refers to as “the writer’s burden,” and he inquires of Settle, “What do you think of as being the first burden that you had to get off your chest and into print?” Settle responds to the question at length: To recognize that is to recognize that we write the same book over and over. The first obsession is the last for me, and I have just finished what I hope is the final and deepest dive into it, what I hope to God is the last novel to take place in Beulah Land. It is called Charley Bland and it is the most profound study of the obsession yet. Part of it is the inherent quest for freedom, which has become genetic with Americans. . . . Then, too, and close to it, is the place of men of diffuse talents and good will, and what is asked of them by the world they live in. Death was asked of Johnny Church in the first volume, Prisons ; too little was asked of Johnny McKarkle in The Killing Ground at the end. . . . There is a self-questioning in such men, sometimes a self-defeat. Am I needed? Have I a place where I can be used well? What does society ask of me that I can...