Repudiating Faulkner: Race and Responsibility in Ellen Douglas's The Rock Cried Out

Abstract

In a career spanning nearly four decades, Jackson, Mississippi writer Josephine Haxton has published seven novels and two collections under the pseudonym Ellen Douglas: A Family's Affairs (1962), Black Cloud, White Cloud: Two Novellas and Two Stories (1963), Where the Dreams Cross (1968), Apostles of Light (1973), The Rock Cried Out(1979), A Lifetime Burning (1982), The Magic Carpet (1987), and Can't Quit You, Baby (1988). 1 These works have garnered numerous favorable reviews. In the New YorkTimes Book Review Jonathan Yardley called The Rock Cried Out "powerful and disturbing" and claimed, "it should secure Ellen Douglas's place in the literature of the South" (24). The Washington Post calls A Lifetime Burning"a startling and entirely impressive departure from her earlier work" (Yardley 3). Can't Quit You, Baby, writes Alfred Uhry in the New York Times Book Review, "is a haunting examination of the lives of two memorable women" (14). Despite her prolific output and the positive reception of her fiction, 2 Douglas's work has received surprisingly little critical attention until fairly recently, following the publication of her most recent collection, Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (1998).