596 The American Century: Literature since 1945(particularly mother to daughter), talking to themselves (particularly in dream and
memory), and talking through letters, to tell the tale of an entire, disintegrating
family from the Depression to 1972.
‘‘Granny would lean back in her chair and start reeling out story and memory”
recalls the protagonist in Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) by Dorothy Allison. That
suggests something else that many of the more recent white women writers from the
South share. The tales they tell are often rehearsed in oral telling, or they seem to
emerge in a style that recalls the spoken rather than the written word. Lee Smith, for
instance, has an uncanny ear for voices and an unusual range. In her appropriately
titled Oral History (1983), the reader hears first the voice of a college student, who
hopes to capture her own mountain past in an oral history project. Her slightly
genteel, academic voice is then slyly subverted by the lyricism and longings of other
voices, the people of the mountains, who suggest both the exuberance and the
enclosure of mountain life. Nor are the voices written into life by Smith, or any of
these writers, confined to just one or two kinds of communities. Smith herself
catches the vocal timbre of the small town (Fancy Strut (1973)) and the rural
community (Family Linen (1985)), sensitive young women (Black Mountain
Breakdown (1986)) and indomitable older ones (Fair and Tender Ladies (1988)), the
recent past (The Lost Girls (2002)) and the more distant (On Agate Hill (2006)).
The voices that inhabit the work of Gilchrist tend to be more educated, conventionally
articulate, but they carry, in their idiom, what the protagonist of The Annunciation
(1983) calls the “cargo” of other, remembered voices that she “must carry with her
always.” And in Cavedweller (1998) by Allison the interplay between present and
recollected voices is even more on the surface as, like so many protagonists in these
stories, the leading character returns to her hometown to try to come to terms with
the past – the “caves” beneath the surfaces of her life that need to be seen and
understood. Unsurprisingly, too, the clash of voices often encountered in these
books by white Southern women has a racial inflection. In what is probably her
finest novel, Can’t Quit You Baby (1988), for instance, Ellen Douglas tells the story of
two women – one rich, white, and pampered, the other poor, black, and world-
weary – who share a Mississippi kitchen for fifteen years. And as the two women, the
mistress of the house and the housekeeper, talk, bicker, argue, and tell stories,
the reader learns of a prolonged encounter that is too complex to be described in
terms of simple love and hatred. It is a matter of being tied irrevocably together by
what they and their two races have done and said to each other, and by a strange
kind of mutual need.
“I am crawling through the tunnel of myself,” observes a character in The
Benefactor (1963) by Susan Sontag (1933–2004). Sontag wrote in various genres
and forms: essays cultural, critical, and political (Styles of Radical Will (1969), On
Photography (1977), Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), AIDS and Its Metaphors
(1988)), drama (Alice in Bed, A Play (1993)), short stories and longer fiction
(I, etcetera (1978), Death Kit (1967), The Volcano Lover, A Romance (1992)). All of
her works, however, could be said to be concerned with varieties of alienation and
mediation: the pressing, often claustrophobic relationship between reality and whatGGray_c05.indd 596ray_c 05 .indd 596 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM