In Dorothy Allison's novel, Bone is sexually used by Daddy Glen, who says he loves her, but sadistically beats her; meanwhile Bone begins masturbating at an early age to increasingly masochistic fantasies. The linked sexualities of Glen and Bone form one of the two main themes of Bastard, the other being poverty. It is extremely interesting, therefore, that neither Michael Kaye, who designed the novel's dust jacket, nor George Garrett, who reviewed it for The New York Times, can bring themselves to mention the role of sex in the book, not even with the simplified label "incest." Evidently something in the novel deeply conflicts with these men's perceptual filters.(1) If "incest" cannot be typed, then it is unsurprising that virtually none of the book reviews mention Bone's nascent masochism. (2) I will examine the connections between Glen's and Bone's sexuality in the novel, arguing that his sadism and her youthful masturbation to masochistic fantasies are not cause and effect. In this, I will be seeing Allison's construction of Bone's fantasies as an intervention in the discourses about "healthy" and "unhealthy" sexualities of the feminist "sex wars." (3).
Bone is the state-certified bastard of the title, Anney Boatwright's firstborn. Anney's brothers and sisters and their numerous children -- especially her sisters Alma, Ruth, and Raylene -- make up the working class Boatwrights' extended family. Anney marries Lyle Parsons when Bone is three or four, and has a second daughter, Reese, but Lyle dies within a year, and Anney dates Glen Waddell for three years before finally marrying him. Anney's third and last child, her son by Glen, is stillborn.
A conflict between Boatwright and Waddell ideas of family and childrearing creates the novel's plot. In Glen Waddell's middle class family, women do not "work outside the home" (98). When he decides to marry Anney, it is not to love her, but to "have" her (13). His ideas of ownership -- of Anney, of Bone and Reese -- fit very well into the ideology Kate Millett describes of "male dominance, power and control" over women and children ("Beyond Politics? Children and Sexuality" 217). While women of any age once were (and still are in some nations) considered legal minors, Millett notes that children are still de facto slaves, rightless, without money, completely subject to the whims of their owners/parents (Millett 221) (4). Enforcing and perpetuating their ownership, adults use shame to control and forbid children their sexuality and to create a cultural myth that children are innocent and asexual (Millett 218-9). Millett presents her manifesto as a universal analysis; in fact it is based on the idea of a nuclear family, in which one adult male has undisputed ownership of all, and that ownership is passed down to the father's sons. In the Boatwright's extended family, ownership and caretaking are spread around, with no one adult having total power. In addition, Boatwright children grow up relatively unsupervised in an environment of sexual frankness, with Raylene's approach "to give [children] their head" (178) fitting in better than Anney's close supervision. Glen's dream of a happy nuclear family engenders incest and violence: Alma, Ruth, and Raylene's haphazard approach to an extended family provides Bone with the refuges she needs to avoid despair and stay alive.
Bone is about seven and Glen, twenty when he uses her as an object to masturbate against in the hospital parking lot. Glen begins fantasizing about his anticipated son, "Glen Junior" (46), a replica of himself destined to inherit his fatherly ownership, a child of his own rather than a stepdaughter; then he transfers his attention to Bone. His fantasy shifts, "telling me [that] Mama was going to be all right, that he loved me, that we were all going to be so happy" (46). The stumbling block to this perfect nuclear family is Bone's unknown father, who is still alive, unlike Lyle, and a threat to Glen's sovereign fatherly ownership of Anney and her girls. He must eliminate all signs of that unknown man to insure that "it's gonna be all right" (47); unable to eliminate the person, he possesses, marks as his territory, the only thing the unknown left behind: Bone. He seems to be trying to be gentle, unaware that he is hurting her -- when he smiles at her before pulling down her panties, it is, "for the first time," a genuine smile, visible in the eyes as well as the mouth (46).
With ownership comes responsibility: Glen says he is "going to make sure [Bone and Reese] grow up to be something special. Whatever I have to do" (51). The whatever includes, of course, spankings and beatings: after all, "someone's got to love her enough to care how she turns out" (107). But Bone is a person, not an object with a nameplate that can be scratched out and reengraved, and she remains not his, unable, at the start of the next chapter, to call him "Daddy" and mean it (51-52). Bone cries, Anney comforts her, and Glen's possession is doubly thwarted: "His" wife does not put him first, and "his" daughter remains not his.
Bone begins to masturbate, fantasizing "being tied up and put in a haystack while someone set the dry stale straw ablaze" (63). Inner fire is a traditional metaphor for passion; Bone's dreams make the fire external, potentially lethal (5), and out of her control. It appears (but is uncertain) that these fantasies began around the same time Glen used Bone in the parking lot. While Bone was hurt and terribly frightened by Glen's use of her, she was also confused by it and unsure what his actions meant; if being used caused her to begin to have fantasies, the fantasies would probably be either as confused as she is or have some motifs in common with the experience she had. Also, Bone makes it clear that this first instance of abuse is in no way arousing for her -- and it is rather difficult to create desire out of a complete lack of it.
Nevertheless, many readers persist in seeing a cause and effect relationship between the abuse and Bone's masturbation. The off our backs reviewer of Bastard, Elliott, insists that "Bone's eroticization of pain is neither natural to her nor a [preexisting] psychological problem," but is directly caused by Glen's abuse (Dec 92, p12). Elliott's position is typical of a number of antipornography feminists who think that people whose desires are sadistic or masochistic are 'sick' or neurotic, that they have those 'unnatural' desires because they were sexually maltreated as children (cf part 4 of The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism) (6).
We aren't told if Glen spanks Bone from the start and only later beats her, but she begins to have nightmares about his hands, "big, impersonal, and fast" (70). The hands are accompanied by his sudden irrational rages, and Bone can remember him "screaming at me, his neck bright red with rage" (100). Three years after the incident in the parking lot, it seems that Glen's "hands were always reaching for me . . . as if something pulled him to me and pushed him away at the same time." She seems to him "something unimaginable and strange," unlike her mother (105) -- and thus increasingly like the unknown man who stands between him and his sovereign ownership.
It is only, however, after they move to the far side of town, too far away for Bone to escape to her extended family (105), that he begins to beat her. "I've waited a long time to do this, too long" (106), he says, and marks Bone's skin, branding his ownership visibly with his belt as he had tried to do metaphorically with his semen. "Too long," because the first act of possession did not work: Bone is still clearly not his. "It was just me, the fact of my life, who I was" that causes him to beat her (110). While the beating may not have worked in making Bone his, it does carry a reward: making peace between Glen and herself, Anney has sex with him that night (108), letting him reestablish his ownership of her, and through her, of Bone.
Allison wisely does not detail Glen's sexual abuse of Bone. It is clear that as he becomes more violent, beating her, picking her up and shaking her, squeezing hard enough to bruise (109), he simultaneously becomes more 'loving,' caressing her with gentle hands (109). When he is gentle, he tells Bone "you're just like your mama" (108). The parts of her that are like Anney, knowable and ownable, he tries to love; what is "unimaginable and strange" in her (105), he tries to destroy.
Bone is terribly confused by Glen's gentle moods. Like sex, what happened was "something powerful and frightening that he wanted badly and I did not understand at all." She feels it is something "wrong, something terrible," but at the same time, what he did was gentle, even arousing: "when he let me go, I would rock on uncertain feet" (109). His sexual caresses are as close as he comes to the loving father that she knows he is supposed to be and she is supposed to love. Most confusing of all, however, he switches in an instant from violent to gentle, from having "lifted me, shaken me," to having "held me against him and run his hands over me, moaned while his fingers gouged at me" (282). The violent beatings become a fetishized ritual, always in the bathroom (111), Glen using the "same two or three belts he'd set aside for me" (112): they begin to shape Bone's already masochistic fantasies.
"Now I imagined people watching while Daddy Glen beat me, though only when it was not happening." Someone, usually a "girl I admired," has to watch (112). While the haystack fantasy's erotic charge centered on Bone's helplessness, the fantasies of being beaten focus on her power, her ability to be "proud and defiant" of Glen (112). Bone mentions no guilt over the haystack fantasy, but she lives "in a world of shame" over these new fantasies (113), in part because they grow out of Glen's love/hate treatment of her, and the self-hate she feels as a result ("I was evil" -110). In addition, however, these new fantasies conflict with the gender ideology in which she has been raised. Bone's role models-- her aunts and mother -- seem to her "born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men" (23), so her new fantasies have to be shameful and terrible, she thinks, because "they were self-centered" and gave her "shuddering orgasms" (113). They let her imaginatively reclaim the control and self ownership that she is not supposed to feel, that Glen tries to deny her in reality.
Glen's beatings and caresses continue for perhaps a year, then stop when Anney realizes Glen has been beating Bone without the excuse of discipline, breaking Bone's bones (pun intentional on Allison's part), and leaves him for two weeks. Faced with the possibility of losing Anney, Glen behaves, and it is at least a year before he beats Bone again (for the last time). Although Glen is no longer driving it forward, Bone's imagination continues to grow more violent. Her sexual fantasies continue, and she begins to tell herself and her cousins horror stories: "Witches cut off the heads of children and grown-ups. Gangs of women rode in on motorcycles and set fire to people's houses" (119). As author of these stories, she asserts a control over imaginary violence which she lacks over the real thing.
Bone discovers that her sister "was masturbating almost as often as I was," and has her own masochistic stories: "she ran around. . . . pretending to fight off imaginary attackers. . . . someone, she imagined, was doing terrible exciting things to her" (177). There is no evidence that Reese has been sexually abused by Glen: assuming that Bone has correctly interpreted what she saw, then the view that Bone's masochism arises out of Glen's sexual use cannot explain Reese's similar fantasies. Her sexuality, and by extension, Bone's, must be extrinsic to anything Glen did.
Bone begins to dream about and covet Raylene's trawling hooks (187). She steals one from Raylene's cellar, removes and polishes the chain, and masturbates with it, thinking about the women in Glen's pornography (which she has read, presumably like every other printed word in the house) who "pushed stuff up inside them." She locks the chain around her waist, and feels safe and protected. While in the haystack fantasy someone else in control had tied her up, here she has locked herself up. "Somewhere far away a child was screaming, but right then, it was not me" (193). We can assume the child was screaming because Bone's natural sexuality had been thwarted and locked away, requiring years of therapy to set it free. Or we can take Bone at her word: she was not screaming because the chain helped give her imaginative control over an unbearable life.
Bone is older now, almost 13, and what before had been an unspoken refusal to be owned is now an articulate one: she refuses to pretend to love Glen (233), and the resulting beating is all the more frenzied for it (234). For the first time, however, she brings part of the defiance of her fantasy into reality, and does not scream while being beaten (235). Thinking back on the latest beating, her hands pushing against her sex, Bone wonders if Glen had "been beating me until he came in his trousers" (253). She decides that he was (The language of the passage is ambiguous: she could be thinking of this last beating or of all of them), and that made it so much worse: "It was an animal thing, just him using me. . . . I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into the river" (253). He had taken the same pleasure from the actual beating that she had from the imagined ones: the control she had thought she exercised in not screaming was not real, and the entire basis for her fantasies of being beaten is destroyed.
She falls asleep, has a dream I will discuss later, and then turns to a different fantasy, an echo of the Book of Revelation which she likes so much, "the promised rivers of blood and fire" (152): "I thought about fire, purifying, raging, sweeping through Greenville and clearing the earth. . . . 'Burn it all.' . . . Haystacks burning and nowhere to run, people falling behind and the flames coming on, my own body pinned down and the fire roaring closer" (253-4). The passage directly echoes the haystack fantasy, but here, the erotic core of it is her power and control: the fire starts at her command, burning not just a haystack with her in it, but destroying the whole city at her word.
Bone's refusal to be owned becomes complete in chapter 20. Glen drops by and orders her to tell Anney that it will be all right if they all return to live with Glen (281). Bone refuses: Anney can go back to Glen if she wishes, but Bone will not. Glen articulates his philosophy of ownership: "You're not even thirteen years old, girl. You don't say what you do. I'm your daddy. I say what you do" (282). She refuses. He tries to talk. She tells him to leave. He rages, beats her up, then rapes her, saying a sentence with each of his pelvic thrusts: "You'll never mouth off to me again. You'll keep your mouth shut. You'll do as you're told. You'll tell Anney what I want you to tell her" (285).
For Glen, it makes sense: Beatings have failed, caresses have failed. The only thing left is what works so well with Anney ("they sure like to do it a lot" -62). After all, with a penis the likes of his, "no woman would ever leave Daddy Glen" (62), and Bone is "gonna be ready to start dating boys any day now. . . . Breaking some man's heart just 'cause you can" (280-1). Like his first use of her in the parking lot, six years previously, he claims ownership, marking her as his territory.
Bone's sexuality and Glen's bids for ownership of her constitute two parallel, escalating cycles: Glen commits a sexual use, a beating, a period of mixed physical and sexual abuse, a far more severe beating, a far more severe sexual use. Bone describes a fantasy of fire, a fantasy of being beaten, a number of varied fantasies, an unbearable fantasy or memory of being beaten, an apocalyptic fantasy of fire. Bone's first fantasy is between Glen's first two bids for ownership; her last is between his last two.
This cycle argues strongly that we are to read Bone's fantasies as influenced by Glen's abuse. However, it is hard to fit Bone's increasing sense of control in her fantasies with an interpretation of them as simply a creation of her victimization. Ultimately, the degree to which Bone's masochism can be seen as caused or created by Glen, and the degree to which it is shaped or molded by him, is open to interpretation. Instead of denying a cause and effect relationship, Allison has taken the more risky path of allowing that Elliott's interpretation may be correct, but still insisting that there is nothing wrong with Bone -- that her masochism is neither 'perverted' nor 'sick.' Allison shows us that Bone's fantasies are one of her few sources of pleasure and one of the only ways she can reclaim control from Glen. They provide her with a way to escape the gender role of nurse and mother that has trapped her mother, aunts and cousins ("Growing up was like falling into a hole" -178). Finally, Allison lets us see the deep class prejudice that keeps Bone from being able to trust or seek help from a therapist or other authority figure (295-98).
There is one fantasy of Bone's that does not fit in the cycle: after throwing herself into shame like a suicide, she falls asleep, and dreams that she is "five or younger" again -- a time before Anney had met or married Glen -- being held by her mother. "She held me and I knew who I was. When I put my hand down between my legs, it was not a sin. It was like her murmur, like music, like a prayer in the dark. It was meant to be, and it was a good thing" (253). Then, unashamed, she masturbates to the fantasy of being burned up by the apocalyptic fire described earlier. In light of Anney's eventual abandonment of Bone for Glen, the passage is problematic, but as an idealized fantasy of the young, pre-Glen Anney, it works to strengthen and redeem Bone as no neurosis can: "It had been a long time since I had woken up like this, with that sweet good feeling between my legs, almost hurting me, but comforting too" (253).
Allison, Dorothy. "Surviving Oklahoma." Out. June/July 1993, p120.
Liebholdt, Dorchen and Janice G. Raymond, eds. The Sexual Liberals And The Attack On Feminism. New York: Pergamon, 1990.
Millett, Kate. "Beyond Politics? Children and Sexuality." In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality ed. Carole S. Vance. London: Pandora, 1992, 217-224.
and book reviews of Bastard Out of Carolina as follows:
off our backs Dec. 1992, p12-13.
NYT Book Review 5 July 1992 p3.
Women's Review of Books, July 1992, p15-17.
Booklist 15 March 1992, p 1334.
Atlanta Journal 17 May 1992, sec N, p9, c3.
Library Journal 1 March 1992, p116.
Village Voice Literary Supplement, June 1992, p7.
1. The New York Times review calls Glen's rape of Bone in chapter 20 a "terrible trauma"; The dust jacket refers to Glen's "sly, meanspirited jealousy" but not its sexual expression. The Library Journal talks about "incest" in the novel and leaves out poverty. Booklist and The Atlanta Journal somehow mention neither sex nor poverty. Only two alternative publications, The Village Voice and off our backs, speak of Bone's fantasies. Back
2. Reticence toward Bastard's sexual themes in mainstream reviews is further enforced by Allison's openness about the autobiographical roots of her work -- Allison is an out lesbian, and Bone is a baby dyke, but it is more comfortable for the prejudices of reviewers to closet both. Prejudice, however, is not the complete explanation, as reviews in the feminist press have also been reticent about Bone's sexual fantasies (eg Amber Hollibaugh's review in The Women's Review of Books). Back
3. As a "masochist and femme" (Out, June/July 93), and co-founder of the Lesbian Sex Mafia, Allison was a target of anti-pornography/anti-S/M feminists at the Barnard Sexuality conference in 1982. Back
4. Nineteenth century humane societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals were different branches of the same movement. Back
5. The character who in many ways mirrors Bone, Shannon Pearl, dies when she accidentally sets herself on fire. Discussion of the Shannon Pearl subplot, which links Bone's obsession with Gospel and the Apocalypse, the violent stories she tells, her family's poverty, and (possibly), through the manner of Shannon's death, her sexual fantasies, is beyond the scope of this paper. Back
6. This assertion is a subset of the larger assertion of antiporn feminists that their prosex opponents are suffering from false consciousness, and have been brainwashed by patriarchal culture.
I'm assuming a basic familiarity with the feminist sex wars here. An extremely divisive, ongoing, ten year old debate in feminism has been between "antipornography feminists" and "prosex feminists." The former have become the feminist mainstream and see the root of women's oppression in a sexuality which has been constructed around violence towards, and the objectification and subordination of, women; porn, sex work, and sexual acts that are not loving and egalitarian supposedly constitute and perpetuate the evils of patriarchy. The latter, who include women who enjoy porn, sex workers, S/M women and butch-femme lesbians, see their opponents' analysis as overly simple at best and a return to the sexist "nice girls don't" ideology at worst. As is suggested by their non-parallel names, the two groups are not living in the same worldview and spend most of their time talking past each other. Back