Fried Green Tomatoes Research Articles

Fried Green Tomatoes: Why Good Feminist Films Matter

Film, as a powerful cultural communication tool, significantly impacts viewers' values, attitudes, and behaviors. Feminist films, by presenting complex, three-dimensional female characters and their stories, can promote societal understanding of women's issues and advance gender equality. They also provide a platform for female creators to voice their perspectives, challenging gender inequality in the male-dominated film industry. This study examines the 1991 classic American film "Fried Green Tomatoes." It found that the film's costumes convey symbolic meanings related to gender, class, and occupation, reflecting societal expectations and stereotypes. A comparative analysis of Idgie's and Ruth's costumes reveals their character traits: Idgie's free-spirited, nature-bound lifestyle contrasts with Ruth's gentle, kind demeanor. "Fried Green Tomatoes" effectively uses parallel perspectives to challenge traditional gender roles and redefine them. By analyzing this feminist film, the study deepens the understanding of the positive role of feminist cinema, enriching feminist perspectives in film studies and highlighting women's self-awakening and resistance through the narrative of friendship and growth.

The Whistle Stop Café and Luke’s Diner

This paper compares the Whistle Stop Café in Fanny Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café to Luke’s Diner in the pilot episode of the TV show Gilmore Girls (2000). I argue that the two cafes are similar in that both offer up a utopian space where women can be themselves, enact their desires and speak their minds without fear of judgement or violence. Through a comparison of the two, I also show the ways in which gendered power dynamics have changed over time: while the Whistle Stop Café provides a refuge from male violence, Luke's Diner functions as a space in which women can exert their own agency through speech, thus keeping the threat of male violence at bay. My analysis shows that the culinary space of the café or diner contains traditionally feminine elements through its association with food and cooking as well as traditionally masculine elements through its presence in the public sphere.

Narrative Desire and the Book of Ruth

Narrative Desire and the Book of Ruth

The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods by Emily Blejwas

Reviewed by: The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods by Emily Blejwas Melissa Booth Hall The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods. By Emily Blejwas. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2019. Xii, 325 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-2019-5. Folks who choose the American South as a place to work, live, raise families, and of course, cook and eat can be thought of as "active Southerners," as postulated a few years back by John T. Edge, founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He'd expand this theory a bit later in a 2017 column in the Oxford American, "An Active Authenticity," in which he wrote, "Active Southerners are reinventing the region. In the process, as an already complicated region embraces new people, and cultural nuances accrete, much is gained. Especially for eaters." Good eaters and engaged readers interested in exploring the notion of "active Southerners" need look no further than The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods by Emily Blejwas. There they'll find a cadre of cooks spread across multiple generations who, through their creativity and expertise, have both informed and transformed the way Alabamians eat. Let's peek at two examples. [End Page 371] According to Blejwas, it's possible that pioneers taming the Tennessee Valley region of the state stirred up the first kettles of chicken stew. And, while the dish might mystify anyone living beyond the counties that hug the Alabama-Tennessee border, it is "deeply sown into the local culture and a major element of the region's social life and identity" (57). Think Lenten fish fries in Acadiana. Conjure up goat roasts in the Mississippi Hill Country. After all, chicken stew does best what all foods of privation do---stretch a costly (or time consuming) ingredient to the point where it becomes a community gathering spot. To the modern cook, the recipe for a chicken stew reads easy---most of what's in the stew is likely already in the pantry or the freezer. But with dishes like these, what's in them isn't really the point. What matters is who stirs the pot, who keeps watch over the fire, and most importantly, who comes to eat. And, just as chicken stew anchors the northern edge of the state, gumbo lays claim to the southern edge. Blejwas' chapter on gumbo pays homage to the Africans and Creoles who shaped the foodways of Alabama's Gulf Coast. "The stamp of African tradition on southern cooking is hard to understate," Ms. Blejwas says in her chapter about gumbo (32). I would offer that it is impossible to overstate. Later in the same chapter Blejwas notes, "No dish better showcases the African backbone and cultural blend of southern cooking than gumbo, a seafood stew that unites ingredients across continents" (33). Indeed. Today, gumbo, often served over a scoop of potato salad, is the dish that calls Gulf Coast Alabamians home. If Blejwas told the complex and nuanced story of these two dishes (and twelve others) and threw in a couple of recipes, we'd call this a cookbook (and a good one). Instead, she's used each dish as a lens through which we are invited to view Alabama itself. Each chapter's dish is the entry point to an amalgamation of history, cultural geography, sociology, and southern foodways. No corner of the state is left unexplored. In her chapters on banana pudding and Lane cake, the economic engine of the banana docks of late nineteenth-century Mobile stand next to the segregated women's clubs of the Progressive [End Page 372] Era. Chapters on boiled peanuts and sweet potato pie allow Blejwas to dig deep into the complex racial history of the state---from enslavement to emancipation to the Civil Rights Era. Along the way, she even finds some room to stake an Alabama claim to pan-southern dishes like fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, and sweet tea. Back to Edge's thesis, most of these dishes (or the idea of them) came to Alabama with the people who laid claim this place. The Poarch Creeks offer a more complex narrative, but even they had to actively reclaim all they...

Claire Messud

Claire Messud Claire Messud (bio) In May, at an annual Boston gala honoring writers, I was to introduce the novelist Min Jin Lee. Over cocktails beforehand, we chatted with another honoree, the novelist Jennifer Haigh. Within minutes, we realized that we'd all been together before, in the summer of 1999, at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. I was a fellow there that year, while Min and Jennifer were working on their first books. For all three of us, the intense workshops, unforgettable readings and lectures, and the long nights of conversation were transformative. We're just three of the hundreds of writers in this country indebted to Wyatt Prunty, who has not only supported and united us but has created a literary home for us for the past thirty years. [End Page 738] Almost thirty years ago, I dropped out of the Syracuse MFA and then lived most of my twenties in London. When I landed in Washington, DC in 1995, having recently published my first novel, I had no American literary friends, or even acquaintances. I attended Bread Loaf, where I rediscovered poetry and a cohort of amazing poets—among them Erin Belieu and Greg Williamson—and it was thanks to Greg that I went to Sewanee a few years later, and discovered Wyatt's world. Arriving on the Mountain felt like being allowed into an enchanted literary kingdom: Wyatt, Cheri Peters, and the merry band of writers who formed the original staff—including Greg, Phil Stephens, Leah Stewart, Leigh Anne Couch, and Juliana Gray—created an exuberant, rigorous, riotous, smashingly talented, totally unpretentious community. On that mountaintop, among those writers, I wanted to belong, and was welcomed. Those halcyon years were central to my life for most of my thirties. I spent a memorable semester teaching at the University, living in a big house on the edge of the bluff with my (now departed) dachshund Myshkin, where the doors didn't lock (who needs locks in Sewanee?), and the previous tenants' children had stuffed Lego down the toilets. In my early summers at the Conference, groups of us went skinny dipping past midnight—imagine the eminent and rather elderly Romulus Linney, naked among twenty-somethings. Wyatt heartily disapproved: he can be stern when necessary, even a little scary. I brought first my husband to the Conference, then our kids as they were born. We dropped our infant son on his head in the parking lot of the Sewanee Inn; fifteen years later, he seems none the worse for wear. There were beautiful buffet suppers at Wyatt and Barbara's house, long conversations, drinks in hand, at Rebel's Rest and over fried green tomatoes and cheese grits at Pearl's. Generations and genres were thrown together in mutual appreciation; [End Page 739] we heard readings and were offered revelations I'll never forget—I first heard Robert Hass read there, and marveled; and marveled, too, when shy William Gay read for the first time ever. We all loved to hear Wyatt read: too well-mannered ever to put himself forward, he nonetheless conceded to this annual event. At my house, lo these many years—it's been over a decade since we visited the Conference—we've quoted his brilliant lines about kids: "'We should have waited until / They were older to have them.'" Wyatt's Sewanee, like his poetry, is filled with humor, sometimes sharp but always bonhomous and wise. He has presided over the precious community he has created with wisdom, generosity and a little recul: bemused by youthful antics, judicious in praise, profoundly ethical in matters both human and artistic. Crucially, Wyatt's Conference, in welcoming spouses and children, has set an inspiring example. The writing life isn't separate from life, Wyatt insists: it is life. Sometimes messy, sometimes noisy, often surprising, always open and supportive. Writers have come to Wyatt's Mountain to learn from him and from one another; he has taught us that these lessons travel with us into the world, an abiding gift to all who've had the good fortune to attend the Conference. Wyatt Prunty, sage poet, consummate gentleman, and literary exemplar, has shown for thirty years how...

Uświęcać środki. Filmowe oblicza kanibalizmu

The aim of this article is to present the motive of cannibalism which appears in chosen film contexts. I am interested in how cannibalism can be used as a cultural communication code and how it exist as functional movie thread. Based on the theories of Mary Douglas, Sigmund Freud, Louis-Vincent Thomas, and Claude Leví-Strauss. I present several movie examples and I propose subjective interpretation of the cannibalism motive in the films in several aspects: cannibalism as the symbolic tool of revenge (The cook, the thief, the wife and her lover), as an allegory of consumerism (Jan Švankmajer’s movies), need of meat as determinant of behavior of movie characters (Delicatessen), and cannibalism as grotesque form of helping each other (Fried Green Tomatoes).

Away from Home Are Some and I—Homeplace in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café: A Black Feminist Lens

This article aims to explore the centrally essential notion of homeplace as a site of resistance presented in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987). Close reading of the novel advances the argument that both the symbolic Whistle Stop and the cafe represent the counteractive force against sexist, classist and racist ideologies that basically undermine self-esteem and empowerment of literary characters in the text. Despite gender, class and race, the discussed characters, however they are marginalized, can safely take refuge, heal and recover themselves in the guarded icons connoting deep meanings. By directing a critical gaze at rootedness, the discussion is grounded in Black feminist criticism that, while largely exclusive to the experiences of women of color, values the significant role of homeplace and informs how the novel responds to this feminist perspective. In the collective effort to offset discrimination, it is stressed that one is to regain a sense of self in the marginal space by embracing Black feminism.

Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture ed. by Trent Brown

Reviewed by: Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture ed. by Trent Brown Keira Williams Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture. Edited by Trent Brown. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 326. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6762-5.) Southern distinctiveness has long been a subject of study, leading to the overarching questions of Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture: "Is there a distinctive southern way of sex? Is there a distinctively southern history of sex and sexualities?" (p. 22). This edited volume opens with a juxtaposition of the South as repressed and as a "land of sexual license" (p. 3). The contributors seek to explore the varied histories of sexual expression and representation in this region known for its bifurcated imagery and treatment of sexuality. "In the American imagination," writes editor Trent Brown, "the South has been represented as both sexually open and sexually closed, as sometimes outwardly chaste and inwardly sultry" (p. 13). While this simplistic, "Janus-faced" reading of the sexual South is, of course, socially constructed, it has had and continues to have real-world implications for regional representations and "the experiences of southern sexual subjects" (pp. 15, 17). The contributors thus examine both in twelve chapters that span World War II to the late Barack Obama era. While age-old stereotypes of southern sexuality, such as [End Page 796] the pure white lady or "'the black beast rapist,'" make frequent, referential appearances in Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture, the book's wide-ranging chapters are dedicated to analyses of more recent sexual subjects (p. 7). These include interracial, activist partners in 1960s Mississippi; white middle-class golfers hitting strip clubs after a day on the links in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; LGBTQ tourists on the Redneck Riviera; African American female victims of harassment and assault at Freaknik in Atlanta; and Southern Baptist girls in abstinence-only sex education programs. The volume has a loosely chronological structure that begins with Claire Strom's examination of federal, state, and local efforts to control venereal disease in wartime Florida, which ably demonstrates the sexual double standard of policing "dangerous" women (p. 30). From there, the chapters proceed somewhat unevenly. Stephanie M. Chalifoux's research on prostitution in Phenix City, Alabama, is primarily descriptive, while Francesca Gamber's deep dive into interracial intimacy in the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is a key addition to several strands of historiography, including sex and the civil rights movement, relationships between activists and locals in the Deep South, and the development of black nationalism in the 1960s. Whitney Strub's investigation of "Memphis Heat," the antipornography legal crusade of the 1970s, as a portent of "Reaganism rising" unpacks an opening salvo in the "culture wars" to come (p. 107). It is worth reading, if only for the unexpected entertainment of the "ironic postscript" at the end of the chapter (p. 108). Other chapters have potential, but they do not quite hit the mark, including Richard Hourigan's entry on Myrtle Beach tourism, "Creating the Perfect Mancation: Golf, Sex, and the Grand Strand, 1954–2010," which ranges from the sexual objectification of white women to white middle-class masculinity and segregated motorcycle culture without clearly connecting these various strands. Krystal Humphreys's chapter on Christian girl culture is a detailed look into reported experiences that offers little evidence for her claims about the positive influence of feminism. Riché Richardson's explication of Steve Harvey's stand-up comedy special Steve Harvey: Still Trippin' (2008) makes a good case for the continued salience of racist, sexualized representations of Africa, although one is left wondering if there is a regional argument to be made here. Other chapters, such as Abigail Parsons's work on Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987) and Trent Brown's essay on Larry Brown's Fay (2000), are tightly focused and self-contained snapshots of specific ways that sex and sexuality have been represented in southern popular culture. By far, and not surprisingly for a book on sex in the South, the volume's best chapters deal explicitly with representations and experiences of...

Fried Green Tomatoes and The Color Purple: A case study in lesbian friendship and cultural controversy

ABSTRACTPublished in the 1980s, Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and Alice Walker's The Color Purple are lesbian coming-of-age narratives that share a great deal in common in terms of their thematic content, publication histories, and cultural afterlives. In both novels, female friendships are shaped by patriarchal violence and develop in the context of the rural, segregated, early twentieth-century U.S. South. But the two novels also diverge in significant ways, as differences in race, gender, class, and sexuality shape their protagonists' experiences of love and friendship. As filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Jon Avnet adapted these novels for the screen, they made decisions about how to portray the texts' representations of homoerotic friendship and same-sex love. Both films generated significant cultural controversy as a result, particularly as some viewers claimed that the films elided the novels' representations of lesbian sexuality. Building upon recent scholarship in critical race theory, queer theory, and friendship studies, I argue that Walker's and Flagg's representations of queer friendship, a term that I describe in more detail throughout the essay, subvert dominant classifications of romantic, familial, and platonic love. By comparatively analyzing the American public's reception of the two film adaptations in conjunction with close readings of scenes from the novels and films, I reveal how representations of queer friendship not only catalyze cultural controversy, but also serve as a vehicle of social criticism.

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

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.

Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives. By Jennifer Koosed

Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives is an extraordinary book with a misleading subtitle. The subtitle suggests that Jennifer Koosed has written a history of interpretation of the book and character of Ruth, but readers expecting to learn of Ruth's reception history will be disappointed—that is, unless they are first captivated by the exuberant and learned eclecticism of the book. In reflecting on Ruth, or perhaps, in preparing the reader to reflect on Ruth, Koosed has gleaned among “the Hebrew and Greek texts, the traditional commentaries, the modern monographs, the literary allusions, the peer-reviewed articles, . . . employing such criticisms as feminist, literary, postcolonial, and queer,” as well as “the full harvests of historical, archaeological, and sociological methods” (10)—a creative and industrious foraging. The book does not follow a timeline of interpretive history, nor does it present a reading of the book as such. Rather, Koosed invites the reader to join her as she reflects on—or perhaps more accurately, refracts—Ruth, considering its text and subtext from every conceivable angle, from parallels between Ruth and Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe to the evolution of grain itself.

Use of focus groups to understand African-Americans' dietary practices: Implications for modifying a food frequency questionnaire

Objective To generate information about dietary practices, food preferences and food preparation methods from African-Americans in Macon County, Alabama, as a precursor to an intervention designed to modify an existing dietary health questionnaire (DHQ). Method African-American males (30) and females (31) ages 20 to 75 years participated in eight focus groups in Macon County Alabama between June and July, 2007. Results The core topics identified were dietary practices; food preferences; food preparation methods; fast food practices; and seasonal/specialty foods. The younger focus group participants reported consuming mostly fast foods such as hamburgers for lunch. Fruits, vegetables, salads, fish, chicken and sandwiches were the most common lunch foods for the older males and females. Across the groups, rice, cornbread and potatoes were reportedly the most commonly consumed starchy foods at dinner. Frying and baking were the most common cooking methods. Fewer participants reported removing the skin when cooking chicken versus those who did not remove. Traditional foods including fried green tomatoes and cracklings were selected for addition to the modified DHQ, while those not commonly consumed, were deleted. Conclusions Participants described high-fat traditional food preferences, common frying and addition of salted meats to vegetables, which informed the modification of a DHQ.

The Cook, the Mediator, the Feminist, and the Hero

A feminist interpretive approach to mediation metaphors reveals the feminist jurisprudence in two cooking and conflict resolution films. Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes both feature strong female mediators “disguised” as cooks who help others resolve their disputes. Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes construct women mediators as feminist heroes and offer feminist jurisprudential commentary. The films’ jurisprudence demonstrates that different kinds of feminism can successfully work together and that the power of patriarchal master narratives can be resisted by employing mediation instead of turning to law. The women mediators in Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes maintain their ambitions, obtain legitimacy in the midst of patriarchy, use talk as a resistance technique and narrative as a way to mediate power dynamics, and, in so doing, emerge as fun, feminist heroes.

Power Feminism, Mediated: Girl Power and the Commercial Politics of Change

In 1993, Naomi Wolf presented a divisive polemic on In Fire with Fire, (1) a New York Times notable book and national bestseller, Wolf called for a new approach to address shortcomings she perceived in the feminist movement. She cited a chief concern: that was out of touch with the average woman's needs and mindset. Wolf claimed that most women did not identify with feminism, stating that the feminist movement relied too heavily upon scare tactics in seeking support. As a result, she argued, failed to inspire women. Where did women find inspiration, then? In some cases, Wolf said, they relied on the media. She claimed that women more often found role models they identified with in the mainstream media than in feminist discourse, for women are fed up with the reminders of their own oppression. We are moved far more effectively by appeals to our strength, resourcefulness, and sense of responsibility (2)--appeals that she noted were increasingly common in the mass media of the 1990s. As evidence for her claim, Wolf wrote that during the Gulf War, women were inspired by imagery of female soldiers. She argued, If the woman behind you at the checkout counter at Wal-Mart can crush a foreign enemy, and probably disable an unarmed domestic assailant, what can you not do?'' (3) Wolf listed Roseanne Arnold, Queen Latifah, and Janet Reno (4) as iconic role models for mainstream women, praising media texts such as Thelma and Louise, Gone With the Wind, 9 to 5, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Cheers (5) for offering appealing new representations. Wolf claimed that the strong women in these media texts were derivative of archetypal strong women--the Greek goddess Diana, the Queen of Sheba, and Nike, Winged Victory--that were reawakening in the female psyche.'' (6) Wolf made a case that in the popular imagination, the idea of women's strength and was successfully supplanting a popular conception of women as victims. Wolf praised modern iconic strong women and ancient archetypes as exemplars of feminism. She conceived of as a positive form of feminist thought and engagement that begins with the assumption that women have enormous power, (7) both financially and politically. Wolf argued that women can use this to effect sweeping change in society--working within the system, using the master's tools, rather than outside of it as radicals. (8) Thus, Wolf revealed her opposition to Marxist and neo-Marxist feminist perspectives. In the wake of Fire with Fire's commercial success, the strong woman ascended in U.S. popular culture, reflecting changing cultural ideas about women, strength, and power. Representations of heroic women in such television shows as Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Charmed (1998-2006), and Alias (2001-2006) (9) helped rectify the media's symbolic annihilation of women, (10) in discourse with Wolf's contributions to These characters took ownership of the enormous power that Wolf ascribed to all women, wielding it compellingly and garnering loyal audiences. Whether Wolf's assessment of the feminist movement was right or wrong (and I gravitate towards the latter, in part because her stance on victimhood is reductionistic and problematic), she had correctly assessed the powerful woman's appeal and resonance. For several years, archetypically strong women like Xena were the pulse of the television landscape, and their narratives implicitly reinforced feminist ideals, cycling them repeatedly through the media environment. However, the fantasy/science-fiction orientation of these shows meant that these television programs usually depicted feminist ideals through their characters' behaviors, generally eschewing clear engagement with feminist issues. This individualistic emphasis reflected a key characteristic of the feminism that Bonnie Dow has analyzed: specifically, prime-time television's longstanding tendency to focus on feminist identity, rather than feminist politics. …

Terrain

Terrain Crystal Wilkinson (bio) the map of me can’t be all hills and mountains even though i’ve been geographically rural and country all my life. the twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two. my taste buds have exiled themselves from fried green tomatoes and rhubarb for goats’ milk and pine nuts. still i am haunted by home. i return to old ground time and again, a homing black bird destined to always return. i am plain brown bag, oak and twig, mud pies and gut wrenching gospel in the throats of old tobacco brown men. when my spine crooks even further toward my mother’s i will continue to crave the bulbous twang of wild shallots, the gamey familiarity of oxtails and kraut boiling in a cast iron pot. i toe-dive in all the rivers seeking the whole of me, scout virtual african terrain trying to sift through ancestral memories, but still i’m called back home through hymns sung by stout black women in large hats and flowered dresses. i can’t say the landscape of me is all honeysuckle and clover cause there have always been mines in these lily-covered valleys. you have to risk the briar bush to reach the sweet dark fruit, and ain’t no country woman all church and piney woods. there is pluck and cayenne pepper. there is juke joint gyrations in the youngun-bearing girth of this belly and these supple hips. all roads lead me back across the waters of blood and breast milk, from ocean, to river, to the lake, to the creek, to branch and stream, back to the sweet rain, to the cold water in the glass i drink when i thirst to know where i belong. [End Page 15] Crystal Wilkinson Crystal Wilkinson grew up on Indian Creek in Casey County, Kentucky. She is the author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street and currently teaches at Morehead State University where she serves as Writer in Residence. Copyright © 2008 Berea College

From Whore to Heroine: Deconstructing the Myth of the Fallen Woman and Redefining Female Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fiction

The fallen woman, long existent in patriarchal discourse and intensified by Victorian sexual ethics, succumbs to seduction or sensual desires, suffers social condemnation and ostracism, and eventually dies, either repentantly or shamelessly. The questions of female sexuality and feminine virtues are dealt with in The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller and The Awakening. Daisy Buchanan, Jordan, and Myrtle, all three sexually transgressive women, are punished, with Myrtle, the most sexually aggressive, being subjected to an outrageous death penalty. Daisy Miller, upon engaging in acts of self-presentation and female appropriation of male space, undergoes social disapprobation and dies an untimely death. Edna, though boldly adopting a single sexual standard for both men and women and awakening to life’s independence and sexual freedom, eventually realizes there is no space for her and submerges herself in the ocean. In contrast, the recent contemporary narrative pattern deconstructs the myth of the fallen woman and allows the fallen woman to live and prosper. The fallen woman, traditionally a secondary character who is considered a threat to the virtuous heroine, has emerged as a major or central character with a revolutionary power that both conquers and heals. Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café acknowledge female mobility and sexual freedom and appropriate a space hitherto denied to fallen women. Eva Bates and Gertrudis, satiating female sexual desires and representing eroticized female bodies, overturn the traditional narrative of falling and dying by becoming competent and worthy members of society. Tita and Vianne are central heroines who challenge the cult of true womanhood, embody the sexualized New Woman and display strength and personal power, making them pillars of their communities.

The Defiance of Patriarchy and the Creation of a Female Literary Tradition in Contemporary World Popular Fiction

Laura Esquivel, Mexican, Joanne Harris, British, Fannie Flagg, American, and Isak Dinesen, Danish, are women writers who have written contemporary world popular fiction: Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, and the short story 'Babette's Feast'. Out of their desire to reflect their female identity, these women writers of four different nationalities have concertedly rejected the long-running male literary tradition, in which male characters rule and dominate and, in turn, have created a female literary tradition in which their female characters not only assert a solid and secure place in the world but also are allowed to display their female strength, resourcefulness and dominance. These contemporary women writers have brought about significant changes in contemporary fiction in which they terminate literary stereotypes and discard traditional female roles and 'untrue ' images imposed on women. These women authors reduce the male role, ridicule male characters and reverse male authority. While lessening the male role, they increase the female role, make female characters the focus of their works, and reverse former traditional practice by portraying male characters as marginal, subordinate or complementary to female interests and desires. Besides, rather than penalizing 'bad girls' these authors reward 'bad girls' and in some cases allow them to prevail in the end. The women writers, furthermore, step over the boundary into the domain of art and create female characters who take the role of accomplished artists. Theme-wise these authors determinedly deal with such distinctive feminine concerns as food, cooking, and nurturing, traditionally treated as trivial and unimportant, by drawing attention to their universal significance and elevating them to serious literary subject matter.

A Wall on the Lesbian Continuum: Polysemy and Fried Green Tomatoes

The film Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) uses a type of polysemy, strategic ambiguity, to transform a lesbian relationship from the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe to a sexually ambiguous relationship. Through textual and audience analysis, I demonstrate that audience members are unlikely to interpret the relationship as a lesbian relationship unless they define lesbianism as identity as opposed to merely as sexual behavior. Although the film illustrates the power of woman-identified experience, it rejects an opportunity to illustrate fully Adrienne Rich's (1986) “lesbian continuum” by refusing to compare explicitly a heterosexual female friendship with a lesbian relationship.

“The Secret's in the Sauce”: Dismembering Normativity in Fried Green Tomatoes

“The Secret's in the Sauce”: Dismembering Normativity in Fried Green Tomatoes

Surviving the Challenge with Joy

never b T.g. either, perhaps because every year brings preparations for a different class. In what other profession does one have the opportunity to make a fresh start each August with new faces, new ideas, new challenges, and renewed energy? After 35 years, I still love the dynamics of the classroom. For me it is a performance activity, and more and more the students are the performers under my direction. For more than 25 years I have been department chair. At one time I was younger than most of the department members; now, several of my teachers are younger than my children. Three consider themselves adopted daughters. These teachers need reassurances when a lesson goes wrong or when an intolerant parent calls about a lesson on tolerance. They need guidance in selecting diverse novels, such as The Color Purple, Fried Green Tomatoes, Cold Sassy Tree. One needed support in changing the existing curriculum to include all voices, especially those seldom heard: African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans. I like to encourage innovation and effect change.