Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion by Monica Carol Miller (review)

Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion by Monica Carol Miller argues that southern women writers use ugliness to reject normative roles of gender and marriage. Careful to distinguish ugly from grotesque and monstrous, Miller traces the use of casual ugliness in twentieth-century southern literature. Focusing on the common refrain of "'being ugly,'" Miller explains how ugly in the South is used to describe rude or unladylike behavior and appearance (p. 3). She identifies four foundational claims at the outset of her work: first, ugliness demands recognition; second, ugliness is a product of its context; third, ugliness often refers to rebellious behavior; and fourth, ugliness can result in "the ugly plot," which Miller defines as a potential life outside of marriage (p. 3).

Since being ugly often requires action, Miller emphasizes the productive and generative nature of those characters who fall outside the realm of normative marriage and beauty standards. Beginning with Gone with the Wind (1936), she explains how Scarlett O'Hara's descriptors are often striking and "arresting" rather than beautiful (p. 48). Miller traces how beauty, specifically white southern beauty, is in direct opposition to having to work. Whiteness and beauty are both standards upheld by slavery, and O'Hara becomes shocking and ugly due to her callused and working hands. Much like the resourcefulness that Miller identifies in Scarlett O'Hara, she also explores the generative power of the ugly plot. Grounding her theoretical lens of queer negativity in Judith Halberstam's and Lee Edelman's works, Miller examines how often the ugly plot allows for possibilities outside of marriage. However, she is careful to point out that this plot is not a "feminist utopia" (p. 99).

In chapters 2 and 4 Miller focuses on the power of being ugly. As opposed to the grotesque, ugly demands attention for being slightly striking and "by forcing an interaction" (p.24).In Flannery O'Connor's fiction, the ugly characters, like Joy who names herself Hulga, in the short story "Good Country People" (1955), actively choose their ugliness in order to reject the confining rules of white southern womanhood. However, Hulga is an interesting example for Miller to use since one of the complicated issues in this study is how ugliness differs from grotesqueness. Southern studies has long been obsessed with the grotesque and the abject as representations of the South's degeneration. However, Miller's focus on ugliness shifts the conversation toward how these authors reject a passive acceptance of female victimhood. For example, Miller explains how often the image of the white beauty queen as a victim is used to foster racial violence. While Miller's primary subjects are white authors and characters, throughout the study she depicts how race and class affect one's ability to choose to be ugly. The success of Miller's work liesin her ability to closely read the agency of a character's ugly choices, and it opens a promising route in southern studies to reimagine the possibilities of ugliness.