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

An understanding of Southern culture cannot proceed without a familiarity with the phrase, "being ugly," often preceded, in many Southern families, by the word "stop." In her book Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion, Monica Carol Miller explores the significance of this phrase as a label for a certain kind of appearance, as well as a signifier for rude, rebellious, or otherwise socially unacceptable behavior in Southern women. This brief but in-depth exploration of ugly women in the writings of Southern women authors offers a solid understanding of the variety of ways in which a Southern woman can be ugly. Miller limits this study to Southern women writers' novels and short stories that were published from 1920 onward, after the ratification of the nineteenth amendment gave American women the right to vote. This full legal status, Miller claims, provided more space for the ugliness that she applauds as a form of rebellion against the idealized Southern belle of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Miller also notes that she chooses not to include books by men because, she says, they often use the ugly woman to represent the failing South or displaced sexuality, but she sees the ugly women written by women as a way to express their own ugliness (read: rebellion against restrictive beauty and gender norms).

The author creates a convincing argument about the privilege inherent in the choice to be ugly, as well as the positions of power, happiness, and independence women can gain through these acts of rebellion. Overall, the book is a helpful tool for scholars investigating subtle feminist moves in Southern literature. The author's formulation of an ''ugly plot" theory is also useful for examining non-Southern literature for depictions of women rejecting cultural beauty norms, though the strictly southern use of the word "ugly" as a label of behavior is less applicable to a broader audience.

Additionally, Miller sets out to denounce the Southern "gyneolatry"-an idolatry or worship of the ideal woman-under the rule of which people believe Southern women are all beautiful, perfectly mannered, frail, obedient, and sexually innocent (1). Where other studies have examined ugly women in Southern literature as a symbol of the problems of the South, Miller instead argues that ugly women represent agency and "a rejection of the pedestal" (5). The strictures that come along with beauty are thus rejected by ugly women, who forge livelihoods and fulfilling existences outside of courtship, marriage, and motherhood. For Southern women writers, this ugliness marks their female characters as unsuitable for traditional roles such as courtship/ marriage and motherhood, two common plots for women. Because of the characters'unsuitability for traditional romantic plots, Miller argues that these writers created a third plot, the ugly plot, in which women who are physically ugly, who act in ugly ways, or who intentionally make themselves appear ugly, reject marriage; it is "a counterplot to more traditional love plots" (6).

However, Miller's choice to focus on marriage and childbearing as the traditional markers of feminine "success" leaves something to be desired in some of the chapters: many of the characters whom she claims reject traditional women's roles (marriage and motherhood) fulfill those very roles. For instance, Miller argues that Esch, an ''ugly" young woman in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, must find forms of success outside of the traditional realms of marriage and motherhood (45-6). However, at the end of the novel Esch is pregnant and has a whole community of men waiting to act as father to her child; it's true that she is not married, but Miller does not clarify that childbearing must occur within the bounds of marriage to be successful motherhood. While Miller later mentions "sanctified" childbearing (99), without clarifying what is problematic about Esch's motherhood as she close reads Esch's experiences, the argument loses some steam. Similarly, Miller makes a fascinating argument for Scarlett...