Ordering the facade: photography and contemporary southern women's writing

Abstract

Proposing a new way to map intersections of photography and American literature, Katherine Henninger demonstrates importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. Ordering Facade traces visual and literary cultures of womanhood that have ordered image of the from its plantation past to its postsouthern present. Assessed in light of these visual legacies, contemporary writing by women emerges vividly in Henninger's analysis as both shaped by and shaping these continuously powerful representations. Typically celebrated for their oral traditions, Henninger argues, South and its literature have in fact primarily relied on visual characteristics such as skin color, gender, or dress to mark social place and identity. From postmodern art gallery to family album, photography in culture has both reinforced these cultural prejudices and provided potent counterimages. Henninger analyzes photography's literary functions in memoir, fiction, screenwriting, and poetry by a wide range of contemporary authors including Dorothy Allison, Ann Beattie, Rosemary Daniell, Julie Dash, Ronlyn Domingue, Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. As each of these writers distinctively re-envisions traditional constructions of womanhood, Henninger shows, she joins others in challenging constrictions of southern woman and so changing meaning of southernness itself.