Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina
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Dorothy Allison had published collections of poems (The Women Who Hate . . . Me), short stories (Trash), and essays (Skin). In 1992, she published her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. The book, set in Greenville County, South Carolina, in the 1950's, is the hard-hitting, often downright brutal story of the teenaged narrator, Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright, the illegitimate daughter of Anney, who was poor, fifteen, and unmarried when Bone was born. The greatest shame in Anney's life was the stark red "ILLEGITIMATE" stamped across the bottom of Bone's birth certificate; she tries several times--and fails--to have the stamp removed from the record. Finally she marries a sweet young man, Lyle, and has a second daughter, Reese. Though they are poor, they are happy, and so when Lyle is suddenly killed in a one-car accident, the happiness in Anney's life disappears. In desperation, she marries Glen Waddell, the shiftless son of an otherwise upstanding family. "Daddy Glen" is cruel and vicious; he brutally abuses and terrorizes Bone, driving her to a life of petty crime. Bastard Out of Carolina was a finalist for a 1992 National Book Award and received very positive reviews upon publication. This research will synthesize several reviews of Bastard Out of Carolina and compare and contrast them. In addition, it will also examine autobiographical details of the life of Dorothy Allison as revealed in published interviews in order to contextualize the novel.
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language [of poor Southern whites] spoken with its real lyrical imaginative force," also questions Allison about the way she portrays dialect (3). Allison admits is was extremely difficult for her to perfect the dialect; as an educated woman, she had to overcome the negative attitude she acquired toward the language. Also, as a Southerner, she felt that the standard portrayals of the dialect were inadequate and stereotyped:
When I really started working on the writing of the language, I discovered that there is this conventional way to frame dialect on the page. Now, the language rhythms of the people I am writing about come entirely from gospel music, country music, and the church. But the way it is generally written down is as if it is in the back pages of men's magazines with the letters cut off and a whole lot of extra letters thrown on. It's barely intelligible and has an aura of stupid about it. And that I had to absolutely refuse, because the people whose voices I am using are very smart people. They are simply uneducated . . . The copy editing was a struggle. I had to fight for how I spell certain things. Because I didn't want to echo the way they're spelled in traditional dialect fiction (Pratt 4).
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Approximate Word count = 1802
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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