The Whistle Stop Café as a challenge to the Jim Crow bipartition of society in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

Abstract

The American South’s social order, based as it was on white supremacy and subordination of women, is reflected in the space of the cafe in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. The titular cafe run by two white women, Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison, becomes a site of contestation of that very social order. In the early 1930s Idgie and Ruth, the main heroines in Flagg’s novel, move out of their respective homes into the back of the cafe, which will offer its services till 1969. Their decision to run a cafe together has a twofold significance: they reject/transcend domesticity, a socially prescribed space for women, and they act on their increased sensitivity to help the disempowered and oppressed—the black and the poor—during the Jim Crow period. The ownership and management of the cafe allows Idgie and Ruth to negotiate and redefine their identities in the context of racial oppression and subordination of white women.