Inhabiting the Unhomely Moment in Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories

Abstract

After the publication of The Light in the Piazza, Elizabeth Spencer did not abandon the South as either a setting or a central concern in her fiction; however, as she explained in a 1981 interview, her experiences in Italy led her to believe that “it would be exciting to be a roving spirit in one’s work instead of a fixed planet” (J. Jones 91). As a result, Spencer’s next three major novels, No Place for an Angel (1967), The Snare (1972), and The Salt Line (1984), speak to her desire to further challenge the “gravitational pull” of traditional southern identity that had informed her early work: while these later novels are largely set in the South, each novel echoes The Light in the Piazza’s investigation of the inherent hybridity of southern identity in the modern world.¹ In a December 3, 1982, letter to Walker Percy, Spencer explains that all three novels were intended to be articulations of what “I think of as non-Southern-type views of things in my (our) time”; despite their often southern settings, then, the later novels resist the conventions of Renaissance literature in their treatment of these “non-southern” themes and in their subsequent insistence on the fluidity of southern identity (Percy Collection).