The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress: Poor White Women in Southern Literature of the Great Depression

INTRODUCTION

1 introduction in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison asserts that “white freedom” is based on a “parasitical nature” (57) which creates the power historically associated with whiteness because whites feed off of the “Other” in order to create their seemingly superior racial status. Morrison’s focus in her text is how whites feed off of “American Africanism” (6). She describes how African Americans in American literature have helped to create an American identity, and she encourages readers to analyze what the “presence” of African American characters says not just about the content and meaning of the work but also about the life experiences and beliefs that the authors of that literature are bringing to their works (4–6). Morrison effectively argues that African Americans essentially have been used as catalysts in the creation of the definition of “American,” a term that she says is generally associated with whiteness (72). To explain how African American characters are used as objects of “parasitical” whites and by the authors who create them, Morrison identi fies “common linguistic strategies” used to create African American literary identities. First and foremost, the use of “stereotypes” keeps the author from having to create an actual character with whom the reader can identify (67). Furthermore, an overemphasis is placed on “physical traits” and “animalism” in an effort to highlight the “differences” between the whites and the African American “Other”(68).The African American “presence”is also made to “evok[e] erotic fears or desires”(68). All of these separations between whites and the African American “Other” produce the belief that African Americans are incapable of meeting or living up to the high social and “civiliz[ed]” standards of white American society. She notes that what further separates the whites and African American char- the angelic mother and the predatory seductress 2 acters is that often the African American characters seem to accept their subordinate positions willingly, making it seem as though they are content to maintain joyful servant status or as though this is the only role that they are capable of fulfilling (21–22). By creating African American characters who supposedly are the antithesis of their successful white counterparts, the African Americans are definitively excluded from “American”identity, and whites, in contrast, become the epitome of Americanness. Although Morrison focuses her theory on uncovering the role of “American Africanism” in American literature, her study raises another question outside of this racial boundary: how is this definition of whiteness affected by those “whites,” at least in racial status, who fail to meet the “civiliz[ed]” standards that have been used to form the superior white American identity? This question became imperative in the late 1920s and the 1930s as the Great Depression had begun to change the American economic landscape and as the separation of economic classes became increasingly wide. Morrison argues that the need for a solid definition of American strength came from a “fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness ; [a] fear of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; [a] fear of absence of so-called civilization; [a] fear of loneliness , of aggression both external and internal” (37). Although Morrison’s reasons for the creation of the definition are derived from America’s early days as an occupied territory where settlers were searching for ways to break free from their “European”ancestry (36–37), these same reasons became a focal point again during the Great Depression. The American way of life was teetering on the brink of failure, and since the country had not previously faced such a financial crisis, a feeling of “powerlessness ”overwhelmed most Americans. Moreover, the economic changes had brought about familial changes that had annihilated the social boundaries that America had created for itself since its inception. As a result of this disjointed identity, African Americans were not the only “Other” used to recreate the national identity. Because of the economic trouble befalling America, poor whites, speci fically southern poor whites, became the new “Other” that the “parasitical ” whites used to reassert the power of American whiteness, and the southern poor white woman emerged as the focal point of this “parasitical ”campaign. Interestingly, Morrison’s theory about the creation of white 3 introduction American identity can be transferred to the southern poor white woman, a seemingly unlikely companion to the African...