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FEATURED AUTHOR—LEE SMITH The Figure of the Marginal Male_______ Carmen Rueda-Ramos Lee Smith has confessed that, despite the success of Fair and Tender Ladies, the section of the novel in which protagonist Ivy Rowe leaves her husband and children and takes to the woods with a wandering beeman definitely put off many of her readers. Taking the risk of being called a bad mother and wife, Ivy never regrets having left her family to follow the bee-man up the mountain, for Honey Breeding helps her rediscover her sexuality and retrieve her voice. This mysterious marginal male who seduces Ivy with his stories as much as with his sexual abilities represents the intersection of sexuality and discourse in the novel. But he is not the only one with such skills in Smith's fiction. Many of Lee Smith's female characters derive a sense of linguistic empowerment from their sexual relationships with marginal men. Her female characters are attracted by these males' capacity to transgress boundaries of societal norms, of the community, or even of race, and thus find their company appealing. It is precisely through their antisocial attitude and their capacity to use language that these male outsiders show their liberation from the constrictions of Southern patriarchy. As they lure women tojoin their liberating marginality, these women are, in turn, sexually and linguistically empowered. Because Smith's marginal men often embody a combination of sexuality and language, they become the agents that aid women to take charge of their bodies and their narratives. Living outside established cultural standards, these male outsiders have variously appeared throughout Smith's fiction under different guises: as urchins, mountain wanderers, mix-raced mountain pariahs, charlatans, and circus men. This article discusses the relevance of the marginal male figure in Smith's fiction and how these male outsiders become instruments for female selfdiscovery , for the exploration of both their bodies and voices. Often endowed with transformative powers, these male figures appear in Smith's fiction to help women overcome the limitations of a restricting home or marriage to emerge freer, even renewed in some cases. With Bentley T. Hooks and Mack Stiltner as transgressor figures in Something in the Wind and Black Mountain Breakdown, respectively, Lee Smith presents the first marginal males in her fiction. Unlike the good Southern boys that appear in those early novels, like John Howard, 27 Houston and Roger Lee, who want Brooke and Crystal to perpetuate the cultural icon of the Southern Belle, these marginal males appeal to Brooke and Crystal's real self. Bentley and Mack do not represent threatening figures who hold women prisoners of male ideals; rather, they seek to liberate Brooke and Crystal from the traditional expectations of Southern womanhood. They are both outsiders, socially unacceptable boys whose origins and behavior are far from the precepts of proper southernness. In Something in the Wind, Lee Smith presents Bentley as a golf player and a Victorian literature student with a dark past of visions and voices at revival tents. In Black Mountain Breakdown, Mack is a boy from the hollers with a terrible reputation. Both are portrayed as urchins, wild men of the lower classes. Brooke and Crystal are as attracted by the strong sexual drive these young men exhibit as they are by their linguistic creativity. Despite revealing later that he is not entirely free from Southern male culture, Bentley's direct sexuality and his initial frankness catch Brooke's attention in Something in the Wind. Temporarily, he heals the split between her mind and her body, for he enjoys experimenting linguistically with the hink-pinks she loves as much as with sexuality. Brooke expresses her desire to make up "a whole new language" when she is with Bentley. On the other hand, in Black Mountain Breakdown, Crystal is attracted by Mack's open sexuality but particularly impressed by his otherness. Simply by virtue of being an orphan, Mack represents an emblem of freedom from social constraints. Mack Stiltner, who has inherited his mother's surname, not his father's, stands as a man that has never been defined by patriarchal language nor tainted by it. The first musician in Smith's fiction, Mack...

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