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 .
