The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress: Poor White Women in Southern Literature of the Great Depression

CONCLUSION

184 conclusion despite the attempts by the “Gastonia novelists,” Vorse, Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan, to portray poor white southern women outside of the dualistic stereotypes of the altruistic mother and the sexual degenerate , these stereotypes created a persistent social perception of poor white southern women that plagued them well beyond the Depression era, thereby solidifying their status as the “Other” in American society. In the 1950s, a series of popular “backwoods” novels were released by “paperback publishers” to capitalize on the success of Caldwell’s novels Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, which were still incredibly popular in the 1940s and the 1950s (Crider 47). The publishing companies even promoted “backwoods” novels so that potential readers would connect them with Caldwell’s. By using titles for the novels such as Cabin Road (1951), Uncle Good’s Girls (1952), Back-Country Woman (A Time to Sow) (1953), and Girl Out Back (1958), publishers were able not only to generate images of “the [s]outhern backwoods” but also to suggest, as evidenced by the references to women, that a version of Caldwell’s Darling Jill might be found within the pages of the novel (59). The covers of the novels further emphasized the sexual content that lurked within because most of them featured sexually posed, scantily clad “backwoods” women (47). These types of titles and covers were even employed when the novels did not feature “backwoods”characters and sexually adventurous women (59). Because of these promotional techniques, “backwoods” novels remained popular throughout the 1950s as publishers reprinted them several times throughout the decade. In the 1960s, although “backwoods” novels lost their appeal and the nation’s attention was turned towards the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, the dualistic stereotypes of southern poor white women did 185 conclusion not disappear. Despite its initial poor selling in 1941 when it was first published, Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men gained in popularity during the Civil Rights movement (Hershey xxxvi). According to John Hershey, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men appealed to “America’s social consciousness” in the 1960s because “bright young people who, like James Agee, had the privilege of attending good schools and colleges [. . .] were delicately turned to Agee’s irony and idealism and guilt”(xxxvi). Although both “[w]hite and black”activists in the 1960s may have been “motivated ”by Agee’s humility in their fight for racial equality (xxxvii–xxxviii), they were also still inundated with the stereotypes represented by the supposedly sexually promiscuous Emma and altruistic mother Annie Mae. Even the 1960 classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, promotes these stereotypes. Mayella Ewell, the poor white female character who accuses an innocent black man, Tom, of rape, is another example of the sexually overt and dangerous poor white woman. Not only is she the one who tries to seduce Tom, but her lies lead to the death of Tom and to the death of her father, who is killed trying to get revenge on Tom’s lawyer, Atticus (194, 235, 266). Because of Mayella’s sexual desires, she creates so much destruction that she is really the danger to society, not Tom. Although Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and To Kill a Mockingbird may be best known for how they positively affected the Civil Rights movement, these works did so by employing some of the same stereotypes that confined poor white southern women in the 1930s. By the late twentieth century, however, poor white southern literature began to change as lower-class men and women were given the chance to tell their own stories, but in telling their own stories, they still had to contend with the stereotypes that had characterized them in literature since the nineteenth century. In the literature written by poor white men, the male authors must not only contend with society’s expectations of them as shiftless and violent, but they must also contend with their own assumptions about their lower-class female counterparts, whom they too seem to associate with the dualistic stereotypes. As a result, authors such as Rick Bragg, Dennis Covington, and Harry Crews face the challenges of reconciling their own poor white histories with their present class status and of overcoming their own prejudices against the women in their lives. Ironically, coming to terms with their pasts seems much easier than seeing the angelic mother and the predatory seductress...