Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture (review)

Joyce Hazelwood Donlon's 2001 publication Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture is a unique study of southern porch culture, combining formal scholarly research and analysis with field interviews and personal history and anecdotes. Donlon's purpose, "to explore how southerners have orchestrated porch life to seize and display power" (26), is achieved through her examination of folk life, socio-political theory, southern literature, and architecture. Enhancing her textual exploration of this architectural phenomenon, Donlon documents southern porch life in a collection of photographs and sketches, the images illustrating a range of porches, from that of the humble tenant farmhouse to that of the stately plantation mansion. Since this collection juxtaposes shots of Donlon's own grandmother's porch in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and of the author's Spanish Town, Baton Rouge, home against representations of historic structures, including Jefferson's Monticello, the study maintains an engaging balance between the academic and the personal. The book itself functions in an in-between space, in much the same way that Donlon claims porches do: "Because I take an interdisciplinary approach, my method is somewhat unusual within academic studies in that it places personal narratives in dialogue with literary ones, thereby narrowing the gap between the everyday and the literary" (26).

The "gap" referred to here by the author resembles the "gap" in which the porch exists. A space between the indoors and the outdoors, a place with its own decorum, the porch is, according to Donlon, a "liminal space" between the public and private spheres: "Indeed, what fascinates me most about the porch is how it helps to set the terms of a community, how it fosters the policing of boundaries—boundaries that separate 'private' from 'public,' 'self' from 'other,' and 'home' from 'community'" (13). Donlon investigates the conditions that determine those boundaries, focusing most interestingly on class, race, and sexual orientation. The author notes, for example, that the southern porch has traditionally offered a space where an African American family could sit and visit with a white family, even when the rules of social decorum would not have allowed them to do so inside the house. The field interviews Donlon conducted for the book provide evidence that the porch can, indeed, serve as the liminal space she believes it to be. In one such interview, Deyette Danford tells the story of how she revealed her lesbian status to her community by way of the porch, by spending time with her partner and their friends openly, yet privately, in that in-between space. The author asserts that the porch of Deyette and her partner, Laurie Reed, "is about making their gay friends feel welcome and about openly expressing their sexuality—about moving, so to speak, from the closet to the porch" (152).

The author's references to literary porches in the book provide the reader with yet another angle from which to consider the structure's cultural significance. Zora Neale Hurston, Frenchy Jolene Hodges, Lee Smith, and Dorothy Allison are among the writers who, Donlon notes, have recognized the importance of this space for the purposes of sitting, of watching, of gathering, of redrawing boundaries, and of telling the community's stories.

Perhaps inevitably, Swinging in Place lapses occasionally into the sentimental. With her own nostalgia providing much of the fuel for the project, Donlon's idealization of the porch and its place in southern culture distorts, at times, the objectivity of her observations. She writes longingly of the hours spent on her grandmother's porch, just beyond the heat of the house, "where my grandmother had her eternal pot of beans simmering" (6). In response to one interviewee's claim that "there is a little place in everyone's heart that is still back on the porch" (20), Donlon suggests, "Perhaps Stirling understates. I wonder if there is not a big 'place in everyone's heart that is still back on the porch...