Repudiating Faulkner: Race and Responsibility in Ellen Douglas's The Rock Cried Out

In a career spanning nearly four decades, Jackson, Mississippi writer Josephine Haxton has published seven novels and two collections under the pseudonym Ellen Douglas: A Family's Affairs (1962), Black Cloud, White Cloud: Two Novellas and Two Stories (1963), Where the Dreams Cross (1968), Apostles of Light (1973), The Rock Cried Out(1979), A Lifetime Burning (1982), The Magic Carpet (1987), and Can't Quit You, Baby (1988). ¹ These works have garnered numerous favorable reviews. In the New YorkTimes Book Review Jonathan Yardley called The Rock Cried Out "powerful and disturbing" and claimed, "it should secure Ellen Douglas's place in the literature of the South" (24). The Washington Post calls A Lifetime Burning"a startling and entirely impressive departure from her earlier work" (Yardley 3). Can't Quit You, Baby, writes Alfred Uhry in the New York Times Book Review, "is a haunting examination of the lives of two memorable women" (14). Despite her prolific output and the positive reception of her fiction, ² Douglas's work has received surprisingly little critical attention until fairly recently, following the publication of her most recent collection, Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (1998).

Douglas's absence from the lively and productive critical discussion of southern literature raises provocative questions about how we have structured that discussion. Certainly, from Allen Tate's A Southern Vanguard(1947)and Louis D. Rubin's and Robert Jacobs's The Southern Renascence (1953) to Richard H. King's A Southern Renaissance (1980) and Richard Gray's Writing the South (1986), critics played a significant role in the construction of the Southern Renascence and the larger field of southern literature. Recently, contemporary critics have suggested that the field of southern literature is as much the construction of the early school of southern critics as it is of the writers themselves. In "Surveyors and Boundaries: Southern Literature and Southern Literary Scholarship after Mid-Century," Fred Hobson argues, "it might be contended that—by defining, by identifying—Rubin and Jacobs, nearly as much as Faulkner and Tate and Warren, were 'responsible' for the 'Southern Renascence,' that is for a period of literary history bearing that name" (744). As Richard H. King writes in "Framework of a Renaissance," "What took place in the years between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s was a process of defining the Southern Renaissance and establishing its canonical texts and writers" (12).

In very general terms, the Southern Renascence, has been constructed as beginning in the 1920s and running through the 1950s, with Faulkner as the pinnacle, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty as long-lived extensions, and William Styron and Walker Percy as sort of last gasps. During the 1960s and 1970s, despite Walter Sullivan's A Requiem for the Renascence, most critical attention continued to focus on the writers of the Renascence; scholars did not turn serious attention to contemporary writers until the 1980s. In The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, Hobson distinguishes between the Styron and Percy generation of southern writers, whom he describes as having an "acute self-consciousness, an intense awareness of being southern, as well as a preoccupation with old themes, old settings, and truisms" (6), and the writers of the 1980s and after, mentioning Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, and Ann Tyler, whose writing, he claims, is marked by "a relative lack of southern self-consciousness" (6-7). "Most recent southern writers," Hobson concludes, "seem, at least at first glance, to be comparatively devoid of influence from past southern literary giants, and certainly are now out of the shadow of Faulkner" (9).

Ellen Douglas's fiction does not, however, fit this paradigm, perhaps because she herself belongs more to the generation of Percy and Styron than to that of Mason, Ford, and Tyler. While her work is not marked by a nostalgia or preoccupation for the southern past...