Raney
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From the lead couple in It Happened One Night to the lead couple in Titanic, the best written or filmed romances contain a man and a woman with different world-views who must alter their own world-view enough to encompass each other. Such a romantic coupling we are treated to in Clyde Edgerton’s Raney. Raney and her newly wed husband Charles are night and day in their personalities, beliefs, and backgrounds. The only thing they truly share in common is a love of country music. Raney’s style is engaging because the descriptive narrative is broken up with plenty of dialogue between the characters, at times taking on the style of a journal of diary. As one critic said of Edgerton’s style in a review of another of his novels, the same of which could be applied to the style of Raney, “Trouble seems a little more detached, a little less fondly observed, like and anthropologist taking notes on a curious, doomed civilization. But his feel for the funny bone in the human skeleton remains dead on” (McDaniel 2). While Raney contains many serious episodes, such as the suicide of Raney’s Uncle Nate, it sustains itself on a wave of laughs regarding the foibles and idiosyncrasies of two families rendered “blood kin” (the title of Chapter One) by the marriage of Raney and Charles. This analysis will explore the character of Raney, a young woman who the author seems to argue is solely the product of social learning (or lack of it) before she begins to broaden
. . .
uldn’t eat ours, would they? Or maybe they would eat American meat.”
(Edgerton 7)
This kind of role-modeling by Aunt Naomi is one of the primary sources of information for Raney. Thus, it is little wonder that her world view is constricted due to false information, ignorance and little book learning. She forms her perspective based on this kind of information exchange, or lack of it, and, therefore, she often holds views that are superficial and detestable to Charles. One of these detestable view points comes in the form of racism, as she cannot understand how Charles could believe that blacks are not inferior to whites. She has been taught this from the time she was little, so, she believes it to the point of making asinine comments that are intended to justify her obtuse perspective as valid but merely make her lack of awareness laughable. We see this when Charles, whose best friend is black, tries to explain to Raney that the color of a man’s skin makes no difference irrespective of the issue. Raney’s response to such a contention shows her lack of awareness of social conditions outside her own social circle, and, her preformed prejudices about skin color make her analogy intended to prove her point skewed to the po
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Approximate Word count = 1684
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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