A Level Place in Up-Hill Times: The Medieval and the Appalachian Woman

SCHOLARSHIP A Level Place in Up-HiIl Times: The Medieval and the Appalachian Woman Jane Eblen Keller Consider, first, a world of isolated, hardscrabble, virtually selfsustaining farming settlements. The people scratching out their living here are kin for the most part, along with some drifters and laborers. Roads are poor; governments and other institutions are weak. Hunger, disease, disastrous weather and marauding outlaws are constant threats. The extended family, or clan, or kinship group, is the chief source of whatever comfort, warmth, adjudication, or education— never mind food, clothing, and shelter—might be available. In this picture, women are subject to every kind of indignity and hardship—except the psychological, social, economic marginalization of "better times." Or so argue many scholars of the early medieval period (between the ninth and eleventh centuries) in Western Europe. After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, the theory goes, the kin network, or family, became the most if not the only stable social unit. Within this small group, where every muscle of every body was necessary for the survival of all, women enjoyed (if that is the word) status, authority and respect later denied them. Now, flash forward some 800 years and an ocean away, and consider a world of isolated, hardscrabble, virtually self-sustaining farming settlements. The people scratching out their living here are kin for the most part, along with some drifters and laborers. Roads are poor; governments and other institutions are weak. Hunger, disease, disastrous weather and marauding outlaws are constant threats. The extended family, or clan, or kinship group is the chief source of whatever comfort, warmth, adjudication, or education—never mind food, clothing, and shelter—might be available. In this picture, women are subject to every kind of indignity and hardship—except the psychological, social, economic marginalization of "better times." Or so I am arguing here about pioneering or frontier conditions in what I will call south-central Appalachia, the area within a rough circle encompassing western North Carolina, northeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and southeastern to east-central Kentucky. The ways of life, the primacy of the family, and the status of 21 women in the two places and two eras (the medieval and the Appalachian) were remarkably similar. The evidence for the first comes from an enormously rich trove of scholarship devoted to women in the Middle Ages. In the last fifty years, scholars have given us mountains of fascinating work based on the scrutiny of every kind of available document, image, pot shard and stony ruin. In spite of being closer to our own times and more directly relevant to American life, the second period, theAppalachian, has generated less scholarly interest. But it has inspired a remarkable group of novels, a virtual sub-genre of American letters. Among other things, these books chronicle a distinct culture that lasted from the earliest settlements of the late eighteenth century until the Second World War (and in some remote hollows continues still). This culture grew out of small farming communities where life was hard, often near the bone, but where women had a functional centrality and importance that is as rare in American literature as it is in the real worlds reflected by the fiction. The novels discussed here, listed in the chronological order of their settings, are: The Great Meadow (1930) by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, set in the late eighteenth century and following a group of pioneers from Virginia to the forts and farms of Eastern Kentucky; The Tall Woman (1962) by Wilma Dykeman, set during and after the Civil War in western North Carolina; The Time of Man (1926), also by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, set at the turn of the twentieth century in east-central Kentucky; and The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette Simpson Arnow, set during World War II and following the migration of a family from eastcentral Kentucky to Detroit. These books, whatever their differences, all reveal lean times and hilly lands where women established something very like equal standing with men—a level place. Oddly enough perhaps, the characters here (and their real-life models) have more in common with their very distant forebears in early medieval Europe than with their daughters and granddaughters who lived...