A Close Look at Wilma Dykeman’s The Tall Woman in Context

Although she never made these claims for herself, Wilma Dykeman was a feminist, environmentalist, and social activist long before these trends became “cool.” The Tall Woman (1962) was published before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). The French Broad (1955) predated Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) by seven years. Neither Black nor White (1957) appeared before the “I Have a Dream” address by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963. During her long life that produced more than twenty books, authored or co-authored, Dykeman wove these themes together, emphasizing the intimate connection between the human and non-human elements of the world. Her native southern Appalachia celebrates Dykeman’s contributions as an author, speaker, historian, educator, and environmentalist; however, with such universal themes, her work deserves recognition beyond the region. Her writing issues a call for environmental responsibility and recognition of the social issues that cry for attention within the mountain culture of East Tennessee and western North Carolina, concerns that are specific to the region yet, at the same time, relevant to a global audience.

A recent discovery of an early manuscript, an excerpt of which appears in this publication, provides insight into Dykeman’s style and her most pressing concerns. Letters from the 1940s made mention of a novel manuscript, but that earliest novel had not been uncovered until recent months. Hidden in her boxes of college memorabilia was the manuscript of The Valley, and, by her son’s best estimates, she drafted it during the 1940s. It was never submitted for publication. The Valley lacks the sophistication and development of her later novels, as one would expect from an inexperienced writer only in her twenties, but it clearly served as a model for the polished work that would later become her novels, and the connections to The Tall Woman are striking. Strong women, racism, social responsibility, and the connection between the natural world and human beings are all explored in The Valley and would be developed further in her published books.

Her first published venture into fiction, Dykeman’s The Tall Woman builds on the theme of environmentalism evident in her first published book, The French Broad. Set in the southern Appalachians just as the Civil War reaches its end and continuing for another thirty years or so, The Tall Woman accurately depicts the importance of a clean water supply in selecting a home site, a theme that Dykeman had explained in The French Broad:

The cold springs of these mountains [. . .] which feed with thousands of steady streams to make a river, have been valued for generations by the families they feed. If halfway up a hillside or deep in the heart of some remote cove you see a house and wonder why its people built there rather than on easier slopes, the answer is probably their water. Cupped in a clear shady pool under a thicket of blackberry vines and old shade trees, their spring bubbles from the earth like a rare gift for the taking.

(119–20)

The protagonist of The Tall Woman, Lydia McQueen, and her husband, Mark, build high on a mountain near a spring. The soil is poor, and Mark is away more than he is home, resulting in Lydia assuming the responsibility of the farm and the children. Lydia’s close affinity with the spring becomes evident as she enters into a conversation with Dr. Hornsby who asks what she is doing on “this bleak day on this godforsaken mountain.” As she responds that she is “cleaning my spring,” Dr. Hornsby teases her a bit: “And pray tell me, Lydia McQueen [. . .] how do you clean a spring? Do you wash the water?” She shows him her healthy and thriving spring: “[l]ook under the ledge where the roots of those poplar trees are, and tell me if you ever set eyes on a bolder, finer spring than that? Or a cleaner one?” (176). She confesses to the doctor that the spring is her “favorite place on [the] farm” (177), and the reader understands that she appreciates the spring for...