Female characters of Novelist Clyde Edgerton

The female characters of novelist Clyde Edgerton demonstrate a variety of points of view for women in the South today. The male and female characters alike in these novels exemplify different social and political attitudes, and the novelist presents these points of view with a satirical edge that shows how foolish both sides in an argument can be. At the same time, he manages to do this without losing the humanity of his characters, and women such as Raney, though racist in her altitudes at first, remains a real person rather than a caricature even as the author is implicitly criticizing her beliefs. These characters express themselves in dialogue that is realistic and that reveals the underlying human being behind the words being spoken. Edgerton does not create these characters so much as he presents them, allowing them to speak for themselves and to show that they have come from real patterns and are not simply the creations of a fictional world.

Raney is the one of the strongest of the females presented by Edgerton in the novel Raney. Raney speaks for herself as narrator of this story, and she does so in a conversational style that reveals much about her feelings and attitudes. The story is about her marriage to a man very different from herself. Charles is from a big town compared to the small town where Raney grew up. Raney is a devout Southern Baptist, and Charles is much more liberal in his attitudes than she. One of his best friends is a black, and Raney c

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ns on the piano--many of Edgerton's female characters display a musical bent and express their devotion to God through the act of playing or singing. Mattie shares much with Raney--both are products of the Bible belt and retain their belief in the rightness of all they have been told in church. Mattie carries this further than Raney, for she wants an encounter with Jesus and actively seeks it. She seeks to find Jesus in the dogcatcher's teen-age nephew. She takes the boy into her home in spite of the opposition of her family and friends, and the resulting relationship of opposites is similar to the tensions between Raney and Charles, though in this case Mattie is seeking to "save" the young man from himself and form the evils of this world. This novel is told in the third-person, and Mattie's voice is heard as a character rather than a narrator. Yet, the author still manages to evoke Mattie as a real person and to make her thoughts and feelings known, though we see her from the outside rather than the inside. For Mattie, the boy who needs help is no more dangerous than a plant or animal in trouble, and yet he faces just as much peril from the world outside her home: Mattie saw before her a dry, dying plant which needed

Category: Literature - F