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Essay The Novel as Social History: Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre and Class Relations in the New South by Bryant Simon Will Thompson is a worker, a white southern mill worker. He is not a tenant farmer turned mill worker; he is a lifelong mill worker. "The sight of the bare land, cultivated and fallow," it was written of him, "with never a factory or a mill to be seen made him a little sick to his stomach." When a lock-out shuts down the South Carolina factory where he worked in the early 1930s, he reluctantly agrees to join his wife, Rosamond, on a trip to see her family in rural east Georgia. The Waldens are farmers, or at least they used to be. Now, Ty Ty and his sons spend their days on a quixotic, comical quest for gold. Deep random craters, rather than neat symmetrical rows of cotton dot the gentle slopes leading away from their weather-beaten wood-framed house. Neither planting nor digging, fresh air nor open place, however, has a hold over Will Thompson. The silence of the country makes him edgy. Within a day he has to get back home to the crowded company town in the Horse Creek Valley, to the smokestacks, to the men and women sitting on the porches of their identical, four-room yellow mill houses. For Will the roar of the machinery and the hacking coughs of the men of the mill town are not the sounds of death but of the glorious, precarious life of a mill worker. Will Thompson is a principal character in Erskine Caldwell's 1933 novel God's Little Acre. Over the past ten years, the daily lives of the Will Thompsons of the New South have caught the attention of numerous scholars. Books and articles about textile workers have piled up so fast that one observer recently remarked that the study of the southern mill world has become something of an academic "cottage industry." The so-called new labor history has replaced distorted images of the South as a classless society full of docile and deferential operatives with detailed pictures of proud workers battling paternalistic mill owners for better living conditions. Class-conscious millhands, these examinations further suggest, fashioned their own culture sharply at odds with bourgeois norms.1 Focusing so closely on regional interclass conflict, scholars have glossed over the divisions that separated poor white southerners. Indeed, the region's plain folks, whether they worked in the fields or the factory, are usually described as a mono- 376Southern Cultures lithic group bound together by the shared plight of poverty and a common commitment to white supremacy.2 In God's Little Acre Caldwell depicted a different South, a South of Will Thompsons and Ty Ty Waldens. Both are poor and both are white, but where they live, their world views, and their visions of the good life are quite different. The structure of God's Little Acre underscores the divisions in southern society. The chapters in the novel jump from the mill village to the farm. The transitions are abrupt, suggesting once again the gap that separates Will from the Waldens. While Caldwell's fiction probes deep into the cleavages dividing poor whites— especially rural residents and industrial workers—these tensions have been largely overlooked by historians, in part because of a lack of evidence. By looking at literature from different angles, scholars can uncover new sources and new insights; in the case of Caldwell and God's Little Acre, scholars can discover new sources and insights into the shape of post-bellum southern class relations. Fiction as Social History There are, as literary critics tell us, as many ways to interpret fiction and its characters as there are readers. A few critics, decidedly few these days, regard fiction as a straightforward reflection of reality. Others probe the relationship between author and audience, writer and Zeitgeist. Another way to look at fiction is to study language, or the author's use of synecdoche and tropes, metaphor and metonymy. Still others deconstruct texts, searching between the lines for muted messages, buried semiotic codes, and inscribed political and psychological contradictions . Another...

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