51 pages • 1 hour read
Dorothy AllisonBastard Out Of Carolina
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison is an American writer, activist, and academic. Born into a working poor family in Greenville County, South Carolina, in 1949, Allison is proud of her roots. She has always identified with working class and working poor communities, and she has sought to broaden representations of poor and impoverished women in her books. Much of her writing explores the intersection between class, gender, and sexuality, and her interest in the feminist movement is apparent in both her fiction and non-fiction titles.
A gifted student, Allison was the first in her family to attend university. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Florida Presbyterian College on a National Merit Scholarship and a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in 1981. It was in college that Allison was first introduced both to Marxist theory and the feminist movement, and she credits both of those experiences as a catalyst for increased self-understanding and the desire to write. Although proud of the many unskilled and odd jobs that she worked on the path to becoming a writer, she also held positions that made use of her education and training. For a time. She was the editor of feminist magazine Amazing Grace and also a founding manager of Herstore Feminist Bookstore in Tallahassee. She co-founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia, a support and education network for lesbians in the BDSM community, and in part because she credits the feminist movement with helping her to heal from abuse and to better understand her own identity, she has maintained lifelong ties to activism and still works to support, empower, and educate women.
Allison identifies as a lesbian femme, and much of her writing focuses on sexuality and the development of lesbian identity. Her first poetry collection, The Women Who Hate Me (1983), and her first short story collection, Trash (1988), engage with the particular experiences of poor, queer women in the American South. These themes also run through her entire body of work. Although Bastard out of Carolina was not without controversy for its frank, often graphic depictions of childhood sexual abuse, it established her as a serious writer and an important voice within the tradition of feminist literature in the United States. Bastard out of Carolina is largely autobiographical, but Allison has also penned a formal memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1996) and another novel, Cavedweller (1998). Each of these texts represents the class struggle from a gendered perspective, highlighting the impact of sexual abuse on families and on queer identity development. Allison does not shy away from representations of burgeoning sexual development, and this is particularly evident in the character of Bone, who comes to understand herself as a sexual being against the confusing backdrop of both sexual abuse and the awareness that she is supposed to “fit in” to the role of a traditional woman.
Although representations of gender, sexuality, and class that feature protagonists like the ones in Allison’s work are more common now, at the time of publication for many of Allison’s texts, they did represent critical innovations. Allison’s work has an important place within the history of southern literature, feminist literature, queer literature, and literatures of the working class and working poor.
Philosophical Context: The Intersections of Class and Gender in Second-Wave Feminist Theory
The Intersections of Class and Gender is an important focal point in much of Dorothy Allison’s work, and her understanding of these intersections is rooted in the second-wave feminist movement of which she became a part. Feminism’s second wave, associated with the “Women’s Liberation” movements of the 1960s and 1970s, sought to redefine the role of women in American society, opening up space for the increased participation of women in the workforce, ensuring women access to healthcare and reproductive rights, and shedding light on inequality and domestic violence against women. Although the second wave is criticized for a lack of focus on racial justice, the fact that it was concurrent with an international rise in interest in class and Marxist theory meant that women like Allison found, often for the first time, affirming conversations about the way that social class (and poverty) shaped women’s identity in the United States.
In capitalist societies like the United States, inequality is built into the social fabric, and it was in college, where she was first exposed to feminist theory and began activist work within the feminist movement, that Allison first became aware of the systemic forces, both cultural and economic, that were responsible for families like hers being labeled “trash.” Allison had lived with that label for the entirety of her life, and she is open about the way that it, alongside the abuse at the hands of her stepfather that she survived (Bastard out of Carolina is a loosely autobiographical text) contributed to the deep sense of shame that marked her coming-of-age years. And yet, abuse and poverty became only part of the set of sociocultural forces that shaped her, and Allison’s interest in class is always informed by her experiences of both gender and sexuality. In her essay “A Question of Class,” Allison writes about being “poor in a world that despises the poor,” but also “queer in a world that hates queers.” For Allison, growing up a poor, queer woman meant that she was subject to multiple axes of oppression and gender-based violence, and a large part of the project of her writing has been to shed light on that experience. She recalls her early exposure to writings on class, noting that representations of poverty were almost exclusively focused on the experiences of men. She has long sought to add a gendered component to that discussion, and novels like Bastard out of Carolina as well as non-fiction pieces like “A Question of Class” are meant to both introduce the way that gender, sexuality, and class intersect and to affirm, for women such as herself, the value and legitimacy of their own lived experiences.
Economic opportunity, violence against women, and the freedom to self-define as something other than a traditionally feminine wife and mother were all at the core of second-wave feminism, and Allison explores those ideas, with a special eye for poverty and social class, in Bastard out of Carolina. The difficulty that women like Anney faced in the workforce is an important piece of the narrative, and Bone’s own entry into the world of work, at the same diner where her mother is employed, highlights the lack of opportunity for many women without resources or education in the rural South. Bone’s abuse at the hands of her stepfather is another important piece of engagement with the project of feminism during the second wave, as the abuse that women suffered within the space of the home was often overlooked, both by law enforcement and society as a whole, until the women’s movement shed light on the issue and fought for legislation that would ensure the punishment of abusers. Prior to this point in history, abuse in the home was often seen as “a family’s business,” and even when called to an abusive home, law enforcement frequently declined to intervene in a meaningful way.
Bone and her aunt Raylene defy traditional standards of gender, beauty, and femininity, and their interest in identification based on what would have been considered masculine interests and dress reflect not only the second wave’s interest in broadening identitarian possibilities for women, but also Allison’s own lesbian identity and memories of growing up queer in South Carolina. Although a work of autobiographical fiction, Bastard out of Carolina is thus steeped in the feminist theory that came to underpin Allison’s understanding of her own life and also shaped her many years of activist work within the feminist movement.
