The Scapegoat: Establishing a Genre

Abstract

MARY LEE SETTLE'S LITERARY LEGACY The Scapegoat: Establishing a Genre Thomas E. Douglass The writing of history is of course more complex than figuring out what side you are on and then adjusting things accordingly. For sides have sidestothem, obviouslymade clearinnarrativehistories andmade even more complex in narrative fiction. Mary Lee Settle's 1980 novel The Scapegoat enters the complexity of historical forces, Appalachian culture, and personality. It is no straight road-jack polemic that sets out to right the wrongs of the past, as the temptation may be there to do. The novel is book four of Settle's epic Beulah Quintet and advances the family evolution of people living in the Trans-Allegheny into the 20th century—the Lacey's, the Catlett's, the Neill's, and the McKarkle's— amid the seminal 1912 Paint Creek-Cabin Creek mine struggle. In part, the novel tells history and chooses rightly a significant moment in West Virginia history and the history of the nation—the coalescence of an inexorably successful labor movement at the precise moment that industrialized America was emerging into a world power. Settle knew she was making the right choice as she told Jennifer Howard in a 1995 interview published in The Southern Quarterly : "I've always been fascinated with where history has a turning point, and that turning point is very seldom recognized." It was a moment in history when the rub of wealth and power in the land of the free and home of the brave often resulted in painful and often abusive inequities among its own people. As David Corbin notes in Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields (1981): "The Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike was fought not for narrow reasons of higher wages and shorter hours, but for justice, fraternity, and liberty, principles that were born of the miners' local experiences rather than a general ideology. The dynamics of the strike sprang not from the Socialist party, nor the UMWA, but from the rank and file." What better subject for an American fiction, and with only a few predecessors, Settle's The Scapegoat established an archetypal genre that is fundamentally American, yet specifically Appalachian. The Scapegoat tells the tale of a day and the night of June 7th 1912, near the violent beginning of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912-1913, that by its conclusion on May 1, 1913, would by some 78 estimates claim the lives of 50 people and involve Gatling guns, grenades, automatic rifles, shotguns, handguns, an armored train mounted with a machine gun called the Bull Moose Special which would be used in the Holly Grove Massacre, thousands of rounds fired and hundreds arrested for sedition. For this novel set in 1912, Settle's personal history overlaps withthe historical record. She was born in 1918 in Charleston, West Virginia, her mother's ancestral home, and her father was an engineer in the coal industry, an owner and operator, the likes of the novel's Beverly Lacey the father of Althea, Mary Rose, and Lily. The details of clothing and place and rhythms of language were more accessible to her memory and imagination. As she told George Garrett in Understanding Mary Lee Settle (1988) "My mother and her sisters were girls in 1912. By now historic memory was getting to be personal memory. In a way I already knew the language. So I began to find The Scapegoat." The image and the question that emerged as a result of her memory and research is found in the opening sequence of the novel—the Gatling gun on the Lacey's front porch. The narrative question: "What are three pretty girls in white and a Gatling gun doing on the front porch of what looks like a house in the country?" For the most part, the novel was written in 1976 and 1977, and in that year she traveled to Italy to complete her empathetic research of the past so she could tell the story of young Eduardo Pagano and his motherAnnunziata, and Carlo Michele, who would play the scapegoat in the ritual pattern of the mine wars novel. A scapegoat or blood sacrifice is a plot element...