Slashing the Homemade Quilt in Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven

In contemporary Southern literature, many women authors have developed a theme of cooperation and mutual aid. Denise Giardina depicts cooperative mountain communities, empowered by the land, that are devastated by the competitive and colonizing forces of the outsider mine owners in Storming Heaven. The intensity of the destruction expands with the awareness that the novel is based upon the actual history of Matewan and the 1920 labor strike; the struggle for justice is not imaginary but real. Giardina dramatizes four points of view, including gender differences: a mountain fellow who grows up with the old ways; a younger man born on the eve of industrialization; a modern mountain woman whose family lives in both worlds; and an Italian immigrant woman relocated in the coal camp. Their threatened lives are symbolized by tattered folklife motifs: a regendered midwife, a blasted stargazer, an exiled banjo songster, a slashed quilt, and a skewered butterfly. Nonetheless, the characters find strategies of resistance and continue to create cooperative social systems.