“I’m No Swan”: The Ugly Plot from “Good Country People” to Eating the Cheshire Cat

MONICA CAROL MILLER Middle Georgia State University “I’m No Swan”: The Ugly Plot from “Good Country People” to Eating the Cheshire Cat. 1 FLANNERY O’CONNOR FAMOUSLY WROTE THAT THE REASON SOUTHERN literature is rife with freaks is because only southerners were able to recognize the freakish. Among the many characters considered under the umbrella of the freakish are ugly women, from O’Connor’s own Joy-Hulga in the 1955 short story “Good Country People” to more recent characters such as Helen Ellis’s Nicole Hicks in her 2000 novelEatingthe Cheshire Cat. These characters adopt an ugly appearance in order to opt out of the rigid expectations of southern gender roles: that they will conduct themselves in ways amenable to attracting appropriate male attention, marrying, and spending their time primarily as caregivers for their families. From Katherine Anne Porter’s Cousin Eva in her 1937 collection, The Old Order, whose weak chin doomed her to a life of spinsterhood, to Celie in Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple, who was ugly but could work like a man, physically ugly female characters have stood in contrast to the more popular images of beautiful southern belles. While these characters have generally been considered under the capacious categories of the freakish or the grotesque, I am more interested in their less extreme—“ugly”—qualities. When asked in an interview about the influence of O’Connor on her work, Ellis zeroed in on O’Connor’s female characters like Joy-Hulga, observing that they were often physically ugly. Ellis went on to talk about her own southern childhood, and how “ugliness” was used to characterize not only appearance but also behavior. Like many raised in the South, Ellis grew up with the warning “Don’t be ugly!” to mean that she was misbehaving or acting inappropriately—a definition that, indeed, is a regionally-specific one (Personal Interview). This southern meaning of ugliness is helpful for identifying a tradition of ugly female characters who choose to adopt a physically ugly appearance as a way of 1 Portions of this essay appear in my book Being Ugly. 438 Monica Carol Miller opting out of the expectations of marriage and motherhood.2 This genealogy of ugly women includes, for example, any number of Lee Smith’s characters from the 1980s forward who, for various reasons, choose to opt out of marriage and motherhood by “letting themselves go” in a narrative form that I call the ugly plot.3 The ugly plot functions as a counterplot that undoes traditional love plots driven by compulsory heterosexuality, enabling characters with material advantages to choose a resistant, rebellious, and alternative existence outside of normative southern gender roles and marriage economies. Although we typically associate beauty with privilege, characters from O’Connor’s Joy-Hulga to Ellis’s Nicole demonstrate that ugliness also functions as a marker of privileged access to wealth and other resources. Despite advances in gender equity in the nation and the South, the myth of the southern belle simply will not die. In a 2011 article for the lifestyle magazine Garden and Gun, for example, Allison Glock insists upon the distinctiveness of southern women: To be born a Southern woman is to be made aware of your distinctiveness. And with it, the rules. The expectations. These vary some, but all follow the same basic template, which is, fundamentally, no matter what the circumstance, Southern women make the effort. Which is why even the girls in the trailer parks paint their nails. . . . And why you will never see Reese Witherspoon wearing sweatpants. Or Oprah take a nap. While there are numerous starting points for analyzing this description, what interests me is the relationship between beauty and “making an effort,” and the moral judgment implied by this relationship. Even if one is “born a Southern woman,” there is still a de Beauvoirean implication 2 See Freeman, The Wedding Complex, and Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition. 3 For Smith’s female characters, “letting yourself go” is a signal that a woman lacks the correct disposition for the compromises of marriage and motherhood. Certainly, “letting oneself go” contains an element of moral judgment, implying a failure of self-discipline...