86 pages • 2 hours read
J. D. VanceHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Mamaw and Papaw have three children, interspersed with nine miscarriages. The oldest is Jimmy (born 1951), the middle child, Vance’s mom, is Bev (born 1961), and the youngest is Lori (born 1962), known throughout the memoir as Aunt Wee. Papaw continues to work at Armco while his drinking habit worsens. Mamaw develops into a hoarder, failing to keep the house clean and staying at home more and more. Vance says, “hillbilly culture at the time (and maybe now) blended a robust sense of honor, devotion to family, and bizarre sexism into a sometimes explosive mix” (41).
Papaw and Mamaw’s marriage turns violent, with both parties involved in screaming matches and episodes of physical abuse. Jimmy leaves the home as soon as he finishes high school, while Lori (Aunt Wee) drops out of high school at 16, marrying her boyfriend and becoming trapped in an abusive relationship herself. Bev, Vance’s mom, finishes high school but gets pregnant at 18, marries, and puts college off. A year later, she has Lindsay, Vance’s sister, and divorces.
Around this same time—1983—Papaw quits drinking, and he and Mamaw reconcile, though continue to live in separate houses in Middletown.
Chapter 4 Summary
Chapter 4 explores Vance’s youth in Middletown, in the 1980s. Born in 1984, Vance offers that the city had changed little since the 1950s. “Armco remained the town’s biggest employer, and though troubling signs were on the horizon, Middletown had avoided significant economic problems” (48).
Vance subdivides Middletown by class: the wealthy, who lived near the town’s high school, the poor kids, who lived near Armco, and what Vance perceives as a third, separate neighborhood that was middle-class—the neighborhood in which he and his family reside. Vance admits shortly after that he is not sure there was much difference between his neighborhood and the section of Middletown he perceived to be truly poor in his youth.
As the 1980s proceed, Vance is witness to Middletown’s urban decay: public areas grow rundown, property theft increases, and businesses close or move away. In 1989, Armco merges with Japanese corporation Kawasaki to stay afloat.
This chapter also provides an initial glimpse of Mamaw and Papaw’s positive influence on Vance’s life, as the two help him succeed in school, while the matriarchal influence of Vance’s mother, Bev, recedes.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Vance continues to balance the sociological and personal by placing his maternal grandparents among one of the largest migrations in American history: the second out-migration of Appalachians to other parts of the country, highlighting one aspect of The Appalachian Diaspora. Most often, the destination was nearby: the Rust Belt portion of the Midwest. However, this migration saw many Appalachians leave for areas farther away, especially the Pacific Northwest, where the timber industry, for the vast majority of the 20th century, was booming.
Driving this migration were corporations like Armco Steel, the Middletown, Ohio, magnate that employed Papaw for nearly the full of his adult life. As the Kentucky coal industry came under scrutiny for its treatment of workers, and as waves of Kentucky Appalachian males returned from World War I and, later, World War II, large corporations providing middle-class work with good pay and benefits aggressively recruited in Appalachia, knowing that similar opportunities were not present in the region. A key to these companies’ collective recruiting success was understanding how close-knit Appalachian families were, offering jobs to multiple, male family members and encouraging multiple generations of a family to pack up and start a new life somewhere else.
Vance goes on to detail how one might take the hillbilly out of Appalachia, but one cannot remove hillbilly culture from that person. Compared to their Midwestern counterparts, Appalachians were, and remain, more private, more violent, and more protective of other family members. These and other contrasts often leave Mamaw feeling out of place in her new Ohio home. Adding to her uneasiness are her husband’s alcohol addiction and her nine miscarriages, interspersed between her three children.
Mamaw’s trials represent the larger plight faced by white working-class Appalachian women in the late 20th century. Historically, the Appalachian region has struggled with high levels of poverty, educational disadvantages, and limited economic opportunities. Women in this area were often limited to traditional domestic roles that restricted their access to education and employment opportunities outside the home. Employment opportunities for women were scarce and often confined to low-wage service positions. Traditional industries like coal mining and lumbering were predominantly male-dominated, leaving women with fewer job prospects. As Mamaw’s situation illustrates, many women faced high incidences of early marriage, teen pregnancy, divorce, domestic violence, and substance abuse that stemmed from their limited educational and economic opportunities (Charles Hurst. Inequality in Appalachia. Social Inequality: Forms, Causes, and Consequences, 6th edition, Pearson Education, 1992).
Despite the often-turbulent domestic situations in his early youth, Vance illustrates how both his mother and his grandparents believed in education as a mode of upward mobility and worked hard to make sure that he was afforded just as much of a chance to succeed in school as his classmates. This emphasizes the theme of Personal Versus Societal Responsibility for the Disenfranchised. This theme runs through the memoir: for any other shortcomings among the adults in Vance’s life (and there are many), there is also the collective idea that they are aware of the more negative aspects their culture harbors, and, as opposed to embracing them or letting Vance sink into them, they push him toward something better.
