Abstract
Dorothy Allison’s realist portrayal of incest in Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) blurs the borders between fiction and real life as it depicts the connection between incest and socioeconomic inequality, examining how the individual experience of incest intersects with collective wounding. The novel subverts the myth that sexual abuse occurs only in poor families, which is made ironic by the abusive stepfather’s patriarchal middle class family origins. By showing that incest in the novel does not result from “White trash pathology” but from patriarchal classism, Allison foregrounds wider structural oppression as the cause for the trauma. Through the daughter’s subversive sexual fantasies, Allison also shows how resistance and agency can exist in the midst of such dire circumstances. Bastard Out of Carolina performs a belated witnessing by staging an appeal to the reader not only as witness but also to remember, thus imbricating trauma with (poetic or literary) activism, whereby the personal memory of incest gains political purchase as cultural memory at the very intersection of individual and collective harm, offering the possibility of change.
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Notes
- 1.
Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz distinguish between “white trash” and “poor whites” where “poor” denotes an economic labeling while “White trash” encompasses a racial category (Grogan 2016, 99).
- 2.
What is more, Christine Grogan aptly suggests that the mentioning in the novel of the Cherokee great-great-grandfather of Bone additionally highlights her family “as disenfranchised descendants of the Native Americans, who were stripped of their home, language, and land, in effect, were victims of cultural rape,” and that it is not coincidental that Bone is “the special inheritor of this legacy: she has ‘black Indian eyes,’ and only Bone ‘got that blue-black hair’” (2016, 99; Allison, 1992, 25, 27). Apparently, however, only Bone’s grandmother was willing to talk about the Boatwrights’ “Cherokee side” (1992, 54).
- 3.
Critics who analyze trauma in the novel include Horvitz (2000), Gilmore (2001), Vickroy (2002), Di Prete (2006), Bouson (2009), and Grué (2013), and have usefully drawn attention to the trauma of sexual abuse in oppressive circumstances, and emphasize traumatic effects, personal healing and survival.
- 4.
For an interpretation of Bastard as a narrative of development or Bildungsroman , see, for instance, Harkins (2002, 290); Grogan (2016, 95); as a “trauma-filled coming-of-age” story, see Bouson (2009, 44). For a reading of Allison’s novel as “semi-autobiographical,” see Grué (2013, 84), “autobiographical fiction,” see Doane and Hodges (2001, 9); and as an “autobiographical novel,” see Gilmore (2001, 45).
- 5.
Mélanie Grué says that writing such a novel as Bastard Out of Carolina “becomes a cathartic, ambivalent process, writing is therapeutic, since it undoubtedly allows for physical pain and its psychological consequences to recede, but the process is also dangerous, since only through recollection of traumatic events can the author finally move away from the pain. Re-experiencing the abuse and facing violence a second time through narrative is a necessary step towards healing and survival, and the magic of fiction and storytelling resides in the fact that they help both the fictional and the autobiographical survivor shape her life and cope with the traumatic past” (2013, 95).
- 6.
In Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (1998), Suzette Henke examines how women in the twentieth century use autobiographical representation as a way of healing the self after trauma and suggests that writing down the memories of a trauma “is, or at least has the potential to be, a powerful form of scriptotherapy” (1998, xv).
- 7.
Laura Brown indicates that social class in the US is “the great hidden aspect of social location” and that a discourse of classlessness has served many functions: for instance, it has thrown a veil over “the realities of income disparities” in the country and specifically so as regards “disparities within the broad swath of the population that self-identifies as middle class” (2008, 197). Additionally, it has worked to stigmatize the poor, particularly “those that are chronically caught in poverty, with all of the social and emotional distancing associated with stigma,” and it has supported the American rhetoric of rugged individualism, “the notion that any one person by her- or himself can ‘pull oneself up by the bootstraps’ and obtain a higher social status and income,” and consequently also the other side of the coin, “that those not successfully financially have failed to exercise initiative, work hard, or seek success and are thus solely at fault for their poverty or financial struggles” (2008, 197–98).
- 8.
The memory wars of the 1990s refer to when some clinicians and memory scientists debated about the reliability of repressed memories and where the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, “an alliance of sceptical psychologists and fathers accused of abuse” (Luckhurst 2008, 73) (dissolved in 2019) undermined the victims’ credibility questioning and denying the high rate of incest cases reported.
- 9.
According to Wilson, the 1990s memory debate is not so much an anti-feminist backlash as it is “a fabrication of a middle class intended to ward off the threat to its moral dominance,” a threat coming from within the White middle class itself (1995, 41).
- 10.
Heather Lewis’s House Rules (1994) is a lesbian novel and thus challenges also the heteronormativity of the White middle class.
- 11.
The protagonist is a victim-survivor of grandfather-granddaughter incest.
- 12.
Cook’s incest novel represents an uncle as abuser, not a father.
- 13.
Allison credits the women’s movement of the 1970s for her beginning to write and for being alive (Grogan 2016, 95–96).
- 14.
Gilmore astutely suggests that the name Bone “evokes the biblical threat of patriarchal property, ‘bone of my bones’” (2001, 56).
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Rodi-Risberg, M. (2022). Trauma, “Trash,” and Memory in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. In: Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96619-5_3
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