Female Betrayal in Bastard Out of Carolina

     In Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison tells the story of Ruth Ann Boatwright, nicknamed Bone, from her poverty-stricken birth through the aftermath of being raped by her stepfather at the age of twelve. While the physical trauma escalates throughout the novel, the ultimate betrayal in this novel is emotional: Bone’s mother Anney chooses her rapist husband Glenn over her daughter, an act that would seem inconceivable to most. In this paper, I explore the cultural and gender influences which lead Anney to make her choices, and Bone’s reaction to this betrayal.

     The Boatwright family is looked down upon by other people in Greenville County, South Carolina. “Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground” (Allison 3). Being on the lowest rung of the social ladder weighs heavily on Anney Boatwright, who at the age of fifteen gives birth to Bone out of wedlock and is given a birth certificate with the word illegitimate stamped across the bottom third of it. “As a member of the disgraced and discredited Boatwright family and the mother of an illegitimate child, Anney is marked as a socially undesirable and tainted woman—as someone suffering from a spoiled identity” (Bouson 105). It’s disheartening for the Boatwright family to be labeled as trash, but as a woman, Anney has even less status. Rather than ignoring what others think of her and her family or living with the embarrassment or stigma, Anney goes back to the courthouse multiple times over the years trying to obtain a birth certificate for Bone that does not have the illegitimate label. Having an illegitimate child is what is expected of “poor, white trash” such as her; the fact that she doesn’t want to be makes her the butt of jokes. She internalizes the judgment of people in town who have a higher socio-economic status and look down upon her. She may carry the shame of being “poor, white trash,” but she doesn’t want her baby to have the label for the rest of her life. This same judgment does not extend to the man who is the father of an illegitimate child. This sends a clear message: to lift her status a woman must be attached to a man.

     The novel doesn’t tell how seventeen-year-old Anney meets her first husband, Lyle Parsons, only that it distracts her from her annual visit to the courthouse over Bone’s birth certificate. Lyle seems to care about Anney and Bone, he wants to provide for them, and he has a sweet disposition (Allison 5). They have a child, Reese, but then two years later, Lyle is killed when his truck goes off the road in the rain, and Anney has to go back to work to provide for her children. Anney is limited in the jobs she might choose, since she needs her sisters’ help with her two daughters, and ends up working at the White Horse Cafe (Allison 7-8).

     Bone describes her mother in the early pages of the novel and says “under that biscuit-crust exterior, more than anything in the world, she wanted someone strong to love her like she loved her girls” (Allison 10). Lyle died when Anney was nineteen, and she “dated Glen Waddell for two years” (Allison 34) before she married him when she was “just past twenty-one” (Allison 309). The novel suggests that Anney didn’t want to jump into another marriage after Lyle, but the truth is that Anney didn’t go long without a man in her life. Her first impression of Glen is that “he’d make a good daddy, she imagined, a steady man” (Allison 13). When she meets him, the only thing that Anney knows about Glen is that he comes from a family with a much higher social-standing than her own. She is looking for a way to provide for her children both economically and socially. She may have held off marrying Glen for two years, but she had to have started dating him about a year after Lyle’s death, and the novel doesn’t indicate that she dated anyone else. Anney’s self-worth is wrapped up in having a man in her life.

     Upon meeting Anney, Glen decides “he would marry Black Earle’s baby sister, marry the whole Boatwright legend, shame his daddy and shock his brothers” (Allison 34). He doesn’t know Anney at all; he’s looking for a way to thumb his nose at his family. Neither of them seems to be entering the relationship for the right reasons.

     Bone loves her mother. She wants Anney to be happy. While she is dating Glen, Anney asks Bone repeatedly whether she and Reese like him. Bone says yes every time Anney asks (Allison 32). Bone knows this is the answer Anney wants to hear, and she wants Anney to be happy.

     When Glen and Anney decide to marry two years later, there is resistance from some members of Anney’s family. Aunt Alma quiets their resistance by saying that Anney “needs [Glen] like a starving woman needs meat between her teeth” (Allison 40). Similarly, “in Glen, Anney gets her wish for a man who loves her desperately— even though this desperate love is acquired at the expense of her eldest child” (Carter 8). This is not an equal relationship based on mutual love and respect. It foreshadows their codependent marriage and sets the stage for Anney’s ultimate betrayal of Bone.

     During the time in which this novel takes place, the unequal treatment of women is commonplace. Whether on purpose or not, Allison drives home this fact in the nickname she chooses for Bone. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the first woman was made from taking a rib from the first man. “Bone’s name, then, is a family name in the largest sense, making clear that in the Judeo-Christian tradition women are, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, the possession of men” (King 127). When Glen proposes to Anney, he says “You’re mine, all of you, mine” (Allison 35). He views Anney and the girls as his possessions, not as equals or independent entities; he is a patriarchal narcissist.

     Once married, Glen changes how he treats Anney and her daughters. “From the beginning [of their marriage] Glen desperately tries to isolate Anne from her sisters. The further away from her sisters, the less powerful she becomes” (Megan 77). It begins when Anney loses the baby and Glen moves them “over by the JC Penney mill near the railroad tracks” (Allison 49) without even consulting Anney. As the story progresses, Glen becomes more controlling and isolates Anney and the girls from the rest of their relatives as much as he can. He makes all of the decisions in the family and only rarely does Anney protest or disagree. This is the model of male-female relationships that Anney has grown up with. Men are the head of the family and women suffer through it. However, that doesn’t mean that Anney has no power in the relationship.

     In her book Mothers of Incest Survivors : Another Side Of The Story, Janis Tyler Johnson writes, “All the mothers in this book described their husbands as men who asserted themselves as authoritarian heads of the household, and themselves as wives who were subject to that authority. But this did not mean they perceived themselves as fragile and powerless within all areas of their lives” (Johnson 35). This matches the portrayal of Glen and Anney’s marriage in Bastard Out of Carolina. While Anney defers to Glen moving them into houses he has chosen, and he functions as the primary breadwinner in the family, when he goes fishing with her brothers instead of finding a job, Anney lashes out at him in anger, dresses up, and goes out for the evening; she returns with groceries, having ostensibly prostituted herself to get them. Glen doesn’t say a word.

     Anney has been raised in a family where the men are allowed to misbehave, drink, carouse, and end up in jail; the women “would shrug and make sure the children were all right at home” (Allison 22). Women are long-suffering, take care of children and put up with a lot from their husbands. This is the model Anney knows and it is the model that Bone learns from her. Bone is raised to believe that “men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding” (Allison 22). Anney is looking for the best provider she can find in a husband because she’s grown up believing that she will endure whatever he does, because that is what Boatwright women do.

     The double-standard over the roles of men and women is reinforced again in the novel when Aunt Alma’s baby dies. Alma snaps over her husband’s verbally abusive response to her wanting another baby. While Anney is comforting her, the Boatwright men joke about it; in this world, men are supposed to break up furniture and threaten violence, but not women. When women do it, they are considered crazy.

     It isn’t simply gender roles; there is a preference for men over women that is apparent in the novel. When Anney tells Bone that her grandmother “loved her boy children more” (Allison 18), it doesn’t appear to come as a surprise. This belief in the Boatwright family matches the belief in the culture at large. Even as a small child, Bone has internalized this message, as her mother must have done the same growing up. Bone hears it in Glen’s voice the day of the picnic celebrating Anney and Glen’s engagement. She overhears her aunt talking with Anney about being pregnant and wonders if Glen knows yet. When his tone has a “loud impatient note [she] had never heard before” talking to Bone and her sister, she is convinced that he does know. Then afterwards, he keeps referring to the baby as his son. Bone says that Glen “never entertained the notion Mama might deliver a girl” (Allison 43). It was a boy that Glen wanted, and that Anney wanted to give him, because boys have more value.

     The night that Anney goes into labor, Glen molests Bone for the first time. He narcissistically views her as his possession to do with as he pleases; he uses the six-year-old girl as an object to console his anxiety and fears.  Bone doesn’t tell anyone what he has done. She isn’t certain why she keeps the secret, but she has a lot of fear. Glen never threatens her to keep her quiet, but he doesn’t have to. Bone isn’t going to tell, even when directly asked if Glen has molested her (Allison 124). She may fear the unknown, she may fear what this will do to the mother she loves so much.

      When Bone is ten, the family moves because Glenn has started yet another job. This time, they move far away from family and it is no longer practical to have the aunts or Granny care for the girls, so Anney leaves them home alone while she is at work. One day the girls run through the house, not knowing that Glen is at home because he’s been laid off. He catches them, carries Bone off to the bathroom and beats her for the first time, saying he’s “waited a long time to do this, too long” (Allison 105). Anney arrives home during the beating. When Glen finally unlocks the bathroom door, Anney slaps Glen for beating Bone, but then asks Bone what she has done to cause it (106). Later, Bone overhears Glen lying to Anney. She doesn’t challenge the lies. He’s an adult and a man. Anney takes his word for the truth without insisting that she hear Bone’s side of what happened. The message is clear: somehow Bone is to blame for this. Over time, Glen reinforces Bone’s feelings of worthlessness, shame, and guilt. He never takes responsibility for what he has done, and for the most part, no one else holds him accountable.

     When doctors recognize the physical abuse suffered by Bone, Anney leaves Glen for a brief period of time. Two weeks later, she returns to him. He is sneakier, but the abuse continues. On the day of Ruth’s funeral, Glen beats Bone again and leaves marks all down the back of her thighs. Her aunt Raylene discovers them and tells her brothers, who beat up Glen. Anney moves the girls into an apartment while Glen is in the hospital for a day. Her mother’s demeanor has changed. “Mama was ashen and silent and wouldn’t look at me. It was my fault, all my fault. I had ruined everything” (Allison 249). When they finally speak, months later, Anney is torn. She doesn’t want to be hated by Bone, but she is thinking about Glen. Bone knows that Anney will go back to him and tells her so. Anney says that she won’t go back until she knows that Bone will be safe. Bone says that she will never go back to live with Glen (Allison 275-276). Something has changed in Bone. She will not let herself be abused again.

     Bone goes to stay with her Aunt Alma. Reese tells Bone that Anney has started talking to Glen again. One day Glen shows up at Alma’s house and tells Bone that she must convince Anney that all of them will live together again. Bone refuses and he attacks her. Anney walks in while he is in the act of raping Bone. Anney calls him a monster and tells Bone that they need to go to the hospital. Yet when they are at the car, Glen begins banging his head against the door and Anney stops to comfort him. Bone has suffered so much at the hands of Glen, but this is the ultimate betrayal.

     Although Bone remembers Anney taking her to the hospital, she doesn’t remember the ride in from Aunt Alma’s, or what has happened to Glen. When Bone wakes up, her mother is gone. “Anney once again leaves Bone for Glen…despite the ‘realization’ of Bone’s spectacular fantasy of revelation. And Bone remains behind, remanded to her thoughts, and speaks no more than ten words aloud in the remaining two chapters of the novel” (Harkins 134). Raylene steps in as a surrogate parent. She insists that the sheriff quit asking Bone questions and stays up all night at Bone’s bedside. The next day she takes Bone home to live with her.

     Raylene tells Bone that Anney loves her. When Anney says that she doesn’t want to go back to Glen until she knows Bone is safe, Anney is telling the truth. She loves her daughters; she always has. “Unfortunately, however, all of that love does not equate into Anney knowing how to protect or provide for them” (Carter 3). In the end, Anney knows that she cannot be without Glen. She hasn’t been able to be without a man for more than about a year since she was fifteen years old. Anney’s need to identify herself through a man wins out. The messages she received her entire life are too powerful to escape.

     Bone says “My mama had abandoned me, and that was the only thing that mattered” (Allison 302). In her mind, this betrayal is far worse than being beaten and raped by Glen. Bone was used to Anney going back to Glen, but held out hope that if faced with the incontrovertible truth, Anney would not go back to Glen. When she finds out that isn’t the case, Bone has to face the fact that no matter what happened, Anney would always choose Glen over her.

     Raylene tries to help Bone make sense of her feelings, tells her that her mother loves her, and asks her to give it some time. Bone is angry and devastated, but despite everything, her mother still remains a model for Bone. She recognizes her mother as “strong…hungry for love…desperate, determined, and ashamed” (Allison 308) and in the last paragraph of the novel Bone is sitting with Raylene and says “I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman” (309). Bone no longer looks at her mother as a child, but as a separate person, and she recognizes in herself all of the things that she sees in her mother and her mother’s sisters.

Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 2012. Kindle.

Bouson, J. Brooks. “’You Nothing But Trash’: White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Southern Literary Journal 34.1 (2001): 101-123. Project Muse. Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

Carter, Natalie. "“A Southern Expendable”: Cultural Patriarchy, Maternal Abandonment, and Narrativization in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina." Women's Studies 42.8 (2013): 886-903. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2013.830540. Available from: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/378. Web. 17 Jan 2015.

Harkins, Gillian. "Surviving the Family Romance? Southern Realism and the Labor of Incest." Southern Literary Journal 40.1 (2007): 114-39. ProQuest. Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

Johnson, Janis Tyler. Mothers Of Incest Survivors : Another Side Of The Story. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

King, Vincent. “Hopeful Grief: The Prospect of a Postmodern Feminism in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Southern Literary Journal 33.1 (2000): 122-140. Project Muse. Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

Megan, Crolyn E. "Moving Toward Truth: An Interview with Dorothy Allison." The Kenyon Review Fall 1994: 71. ProQuest. Web. 17 Jan. 2015 .