Siblings and Sex: A New Approach to the Fiction of Lee Smith

The article calls for a feminist reappraisal of the fiction of contemporary Appalachian writer Lee Smith, one that acknowledges the pattern of female disempowerment and sexual abuse that permeates so much of her work, alongside its more positive portrayals of female creativity, sexuality, and strength. In particular, the article focuses on a specific motif within the broader pattern of sexual exploitation in Smith's writing: that of the vulnerable young girl seduced (or raped) by a slightly older brother or brother figure. It draws from two little-known texts from early in Smith's career to establish the existence of the motif and then traces its reemergence as an undercurrent in her mature fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. In this body of work, Smith explores with increasing subtlety the consequences of sibling incest for adolescent girls and the adult women they become, and, while her later novels hold out more possibilities for survivorship and survivor discourse than do the earliest works, the fiction as a whole hardly charts a clear and straightforward path from silence to speech or exploitation to empowerment.