Eudora Welty and Daniel Woodrell: Writings of the Upland South

In her address entitled “New Landscapes of Southern Literary Studies” at the 2012 Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference, Barbara Ladd urged her audience to question previous regional models and to consider “a more fluid sense of regionality” (12). Just as the new southern studies moved the South onto the global map by emphasizing its connections beyond the borders of the United States, Ladd believes that it is time to re-examine other neglected areas of the South, specifically, the area variously designated as the Upper/Upland/Mountain South or Appalachia. After Bacon’s Rebellion, Ladd explains,

poor whites and small farmers would be pushed to the margins (of the “plantation,” that is, with their backs against the swamp, as Lillian Smith says, and into the Upper and Mountain South), but important too is that they would be pushed beyond those margins, into the Midwest and elsewhere, and that they brought their “southernness” with them.

(4–5)

Southern literary studies have tended to neglect these inhabitants of the borderlands. Ladd comments, “we have yet to see a well-developed narrative of ‘class’ in southern literary and cultural studies, specifically one that accounts, in any truly historicized way, for the poor South and, even more specifically, for the poor white South” (2). For the purposes of this essay, I focus on two works that emerged from this region. Eudora Welty is closely linked to Mississippi and the Delta in her writing, but she also wrote an “Appalachian” novel, Losing Battles, set in the hill country of Mississippi. I compare Welty’s 1970 novel to Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 Missouri Ozarks novel Winter’s Bone. Comparing this contemporary novel to Welty’s novel helps readers to understand the complex history of these regions, the violence and beauty along with the exploitation of resources. At the same time, the two works provide new insights into class and the poor white along with different perspectives on education, family, and community.

Remapping the borderland South into the South as a whole first requires the process of removing lines and borders designating counties, cities, and highways and returning to a physical or even topographical map. For this region, especially, the physical characteristics of the land itself have determined migration patterns, agriculture, trade, and cultural influences. In his book Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada, John C. Hudson groups the Southern Appalachian Mountain, Interior Low Plateau, and Ozark-Ouachita subregions together into a larger region called the Upland South (101). Hudson notes that this region is also described, less precisely, as the Upper South. This major geographical division in the South designates a region characterized by generally higher elevation, poorer agriculture, and an antebellum economy not closely identified with slavery. On the other hand, Hudson identifies the lowland or Deep South with slavery, a historical African-American presence, and large-scale agriculture (101). For the purposes of this essay, I will use the term “Appalachia” for a specific subregion along with the term “Upland South” to designate the larger region that also includes the Ozarks along with the Interior Low Plateaus that run from southern Ohio to northern Alabama (Hudson 118).

At the beginning of his recent book, Inhabiting Contemporary Southern and Appalachian Literature: Region and Place in the Twenty-First Century, Casey Clabough emphasizes the importance of scholarly and geographical mapping as he writes:

Place: Spring Branch Farm, Appomattox County, Virginia, USA

Latitude: 37.41261

Longitude: –78.75932

(3)

Clabough’s introduction suggests the need for the scholar to chart his or her location before moving on to a discussion of place in literature. I had to undergo a similar mapping process after moving to Cullowhee, North Carolina, to take my first full-time teaching position at Western Carolina University. With a dissertation on Welty and an intimate knowledge of lower South writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, I felt prepared to teach southern literature. What I encountered, however, was a different kind of southern landscape, one that included the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with its unbounded natural...