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  • Go West, Young Woman: Transforming Southern Womanhood through the Myth of the American West in Doris Betts’s Heading West and The Sharp Teeth of Love
  • Ashley Sufflé Robinson (bio)

In 1920, Lucian Lamar Knight—best known for editing the Atlantic Constitution—waxed nostalgic about Southern womanhood:

It took the civilization of an Old South to produce her [“the Confederate woman”]—a civilization whose exquisite but fallen fabric now belongs to the Dust of dreams. But we have not lost the blood royal of the ancient line; and in the veins of an infant Southland still ripples the heroic strain. The Confederate woman, in her silent influence, in her eternal vigil, still abides. Her gentle spirit is the priceless heritage of her daughters.

(qtd. in Jones 4)

Though others may resist such an antiquated characterization, Knight’s century-old sentiments still hold a great deal of truth for women of the American South. Tradition binds the two sides, and tradition has a way of defying logic. One narrative depiction of the resulting tension is the work of Doris Betts (1932–2012). This essay will explore two of Betts’s later novels, Heading West (1981) and The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997), in terms of the sometimes combustive consequences and implications of Southern womanhood.

Betts’s novels depict how upholding the legacy of the Southern belle requires women to deny autonomy in favor of an impossible ideal. Unfortunately, Betts suggests, there is little hope for women to attain individualized identity within the cultural and geographic confines of the South. To remedy this predicament, Betts depicts women who consequently abandon the region in order to achieve self-actualization by traveling west, but the question quickly follows: “Why the West?” If Betts’s heroines require nothing more than a blank slate, there are equally symbolic landscapes in the mountains of Appalachia or the plains of the Midwest. The answer lies in the West’s potential for absolute freedom and transformation. At the same time, the inherent masculinity of the mythic West poses a problem for Betts because she does not believe achieving selfhood means completely abandoning femininity. To circumvent this issue, she creates in Heading West and The Sharp Teeth of Love feminized, transformative narratives. [End Page 109]

Betts and the History of the South/West Dynamic

Betts’s own history is inextricably linked with the American South. Born in 1932 in Iredell County, North Carolina, Betts spent most of her life in her home state. A journalist-turned-teacher, Betts began teaching literature at the University of North Carolina in 1966 and continued to do so for the next thirty-three years. Although she loved the classroom, her passion was always writing. Over the course of her career, Betts’s down-home charm (she once admitted that she “wouldn’t do household tasks even if the President were coming to dinner”) and her Southern sensibility enchanted readers across the South (qtd. in Evans 24). Her work has also received its fair share of critical acclaim. Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories (1973), one of her short story collections, was a National Book Award finalist. Another short story, “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” was turned into a short film that won an Academy Award in 1981 and was later adapted into an off-Broadway play that garnered the 1998 New York Drama Critic’s Circle award (Vitello). Her novels have also received high praise. Souls Raised from the Dead (1994), for instance, won the Southern Book Award and was named one of the best books of 1994 by The New York Times (Vitello).1 And, of particular interest here, both Heading West and The Sharp Teeth of Love received warm critical receptions and contributed to her appointment as the Chancellor of the Southern Writers Fellowship in 1997 (U of North Carolina).

The American South thematically unites Betts’s novels and short stories. Often compared to Flannery O’Connor’s work, Betts’s writing also focuses on issues of the South and the human condition, but she treats them in a style all her own. While her early work kept its roots close to home, Betts was awed during a 1971 visit to the...

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