In Storming Heaven, Denise Giardina allows "normal" ideologies of sexism and compulsory heterosexuality to remain unquestioned and "natural." She writes a love story that self-consciously models the romance between Rondal and Carrie on the violent and cruel "love" of Heathcliff for Catherine in Wuthering Heights. In Bastard out of Carolina, in contrast, Dorothy Allison explicitly shows the inhumanity of those same ideologies, forcing us to question and reject them. She makes the "love" between Glen and Annie also be based in cruelty and violence, but writes a tragedy that shows the horrible effect that such a love "held together with lies" (248) has on Annie's daughter Bone, who comes to hate herself and the world.
In addition, however, Bone and her sister Reese are young masochists, who build elaborate fantasies of having "someone, someone" do "terrible exciting things" to them (176). Some reviewers link Bone's masochism to the physical and sexual abuse she suffers (elliott), a link Allison emphatically denies ("Surviving Oklahoma"). Instead, I think Bone's fantasies of dominance and submission work as an articulate and self-conscious version of the dominance practiced by Glen over Annie or by Beau over Maggie. Furthermore, these examples of male dominance are simply external and brutal forms of the more genteel sexism found in Carrie and Rondal's model "romance." We learn how to be heterosexual from books like Giardina's, and in them Mister Tall, Dark and Handsome is often only a mask for Master TDH.
I should emphasize, however, that I do not see Giardina as antifeminist or unfeminist. Economically socialist, she writes positive portrayals of working women and promotes a hell-less theology: this is no friend of capitalists or reactionaries.(1) Implying that extramarital sex is in no way sinful, she frees Carrie from the "good girl" straitjacket Miles tries to confine her in. This is feminist, and I repudiate Catharine MacKinnon's claim that "sex feeling good" for a woman is for her to be "enjoying one's subordination" (218). At the same time, I partly agree with MacKinnon's assumption that the heterosexuality culture trains us to accept helps perpetuate (but is not solely responsible for) male dominance. If Giardina had attempted a less familiar, more upsetting story that disputed the terms of romance, this paper would be much different.
Giardina and Allison are writing different kinds of working class fiction. When Bone breaks into Woolworth's, she compares "all the things on display" to Raylene's basement full of preserves, which were "worth something. All this stuff seemed tawdry and useless" (224-225). Bone desperately wants the bread of middle class life for herself and her mother: enough food, new clothes, a house; and she also wants roses, but not the rider lawnmower or the loveless suburban house that goes with them. Allison focuses on the cultural oppression and colonization of her impoverished people through the imposition of upper class values, as well as the withholding of money.
Carrie, in contrast, feels "very proud" at having bought things (fabrics and an electric lamp) for the first time "with my own money" (91). Unlike Bone, Carrie accepts and values the accouterments of bourgeois living. Likewise, when she resumes working after marrying Albion, she feels "pride" in having been able to do without the extra income for six months, "now that we were a bit better off" (166). This is a gentrified pride, integral to her father's belief, echoed by her brother, that "we were raised better than that" (34). Capitalism rewards those who emulate its values: Mr. Bishop's class pretensions cause him to find the money to send Carrie and Miles to school, which in turn enables her to feel pride in her new status as a consumer. Giardina's focus is primarily economic, and she is fooled (as are we all) into taking bourgeois values with her money.
Foucault would argue that such supposedly meritocratic, actually oppressive values of the bourgeoisie arise out of the internalization of discipline. Wage work was not located in the home, which had established social routines of kin obligation and physical routines of wife, child, and servant beating to enforce discipline. Lacking such established external methods to force people to, at the most basic level, get up in the morning and go to work, we have become self-disciplining, creating enforcers inside our heads. Such enforcement is far more cost-effective, and far more powerful. As capitalism appropriates portions of the home in its search for new markets and profits, it willy- nilly establishes new areas of internalized discipline. The New York Times Book Review recently carried ads that, assuming we already fear we do not know how to have sex properly, offered to sell us instructional videos.
Allison is ambivalent, as am I, on the desirability of such internalization. Bone's family sits on the porch and tells stories about themselves and each other, stories that Bone hates and cherishes, since they let her know that "I was who I was going to be, . . . a Boatwright woman" (309). But she also reads everything she can get her hands on, from the pornographic "paperbacks Daddy Glen hid in the garage" (193), to children's classics from the library, to pulp fiction from the "thrift store" and the "paperback exchange" (119). The books tell her that people exist, whom she could be like, for whom "growing up" is not "like falling into a hole" (178), but they also let her know "who we were" (82); not the wonderful Vivien Leigh, but the trashy Emma Slattery (206). Capitalism can replace a system where discipline is enforced through the beating of wives and children, but will the replacement be any better?
I see the relationship between Carrie and Rondal as an example of that replacement. Before examining their romance, let me suggest some ways to think about it. Before the lovers meet, Carrie imagines herself as "Florence Nightingale in the Crimean"; her work in Vulcan is "a challenge for me, an adventure" (90). At first, Rondal is a "poor boy trapped in the mines" to her (99). Bakhtin would call this self-centeredness an example of Carrie's defining the world in terms of herself, rather than the other way around. Her vision is mono- or perhaps autological, seeing herself as an autonomous individual exploring a radically alterior and exterior world.
Since capitalism operates outside kin or community relations, this has become the preferred way of thinking about ourselves. However, just as the only way we can see our face is by looking in the mirror, the only way we can imagine, and thereby create, ourselves is from the outside, through others. Thus Allison has Bone see herself being seen by both poorer (i.e, Lyle's hill country mother) and richer people. Through Shannon Pearl's story, we see Bone both hating and loving a girl uncomfortably like herself.
Giardina begins to tell a story like this, with several narrators, but all except Carrie and Rondal's voices fade and then die out. And the lovers do not make good psychological mirrors for one another, for two reasons. First, they are too much alike to bring out the differences in each other (like looking in a mirror with your nose touching it). When they meet, Rondal says it "sounds like you're from around here" (97). They share the same dialect, culture, and devotion to the land of Homeplace, just as they come to share the same labor movement politics. Despite class differences, they pretend to be equals, which leads to a second, core reason. They misunderstand and misrecognize each other. Trapped in autological thinking, they fall in love not with themselves, or with the other, but with a fantasy they project onto the other.
Carrie's fantasy is laid out at the beginning of her first narrative: she wants, at age ten, to be Catherine out of Wuthering Heights, "waiting for Heathcliff," a lover to come to her (not her to him), "from outside, bearing with him both passion and menace" (30). Throughout, she imagines Rondal as the Heathcliff she has been waiting for. If Heathcliff was swarthy, Rondal is black with coal dust, in both signifying an exotically erotic lower class status. He contains both "menace" (he has a violent and mysterious past), and "passion" (she begins daydreaming about him).
This resonates with Anne McClintock's observations in "Maid to Order: Commercial S/M and Gender Power," that the Victorian sexologists who first named and pathologized sadism saw it as an extreme of "normal" male aggression, an alarming degeneration by white males from proper, unfetishized male dominance into the depraved sexuality of savages and dark skinned people. In S/M subculture, the dominant, or top, controls the sexual act (Califia, 158ff). Rondal tops Carrie every time they have sex before his paralysis: he is the initiator throughout while she acquiesces to being kissed, undressed, and so on. She might have been passive the first time as a compromise with her fear of her family's disapproval of her becoming a "fallen woman" (111), but not in the later sex scenes, when she is eight years older and a widow.
The reasons for her continuing passivity toward and love for this creep are best expressed when she explains to Albion that Rondal "makes me feel alive" (149). The assumption is that she is dead without him: he brings the passion (she has none of her own) and the menace, or excitement, to their love. And Rondal's primary menace is not his dangerous work but his refusal to return Carrie's love. He isn't the "kind of man to fall in love with a woman," he tells her, for he has "nothing to give you" (110-11). His rejections hurt her, but she loves him regardless (111). Similarly, the dominant Rondal says "it pleasured me" to "hurt" Carrie; then "her eyes reproached me. I never felt so close to Carrie as when she looked at me that way" (174).
For Bakhtin, someone who believes they are autonomous and not dependent on others for self definition denies that other people equal to themselves exist. To step outside the capitalist individualist myth requires the recognition of an other, a you or she/he, as "another and equal I" (Todorov 107). Neither of these characters is very articulate about their feelings, especially Rondal, so it is difficult to discuss them. Carrie thinks that she is destined by God to love Rondal (111), and sees in him not an equal other "I" but someone who is predestined with her. She tells him that she loves him with the expectation that he will naturally love her back. He sees this as "a look of such assurance that I can't abide it" (246), a presumptive appropriation of his autonomous individuality. In retaliation, he gets angry or "impatient" (246), and says something calculated to hurt.
But to hurt her, he must recognize her humanity as an equal other long enough to repudiate it. In that moment, he sees that "she's just like the rest of us, that she's not any stronger," and "can come close to loving Carrie then, after I've hurt her" (246). Carrie in turn seems to take that moment of recognition as proof that he is returning her love, however hatefully. Rondal thus becomes both the sexually dominant top and the emotionally sadistic top, with Carrie as his sexual and emotional bottom.
To say so, however, is unthinkable. After all, Rondal is an "intelligent and sensitive" man (99), yet endearingly childish in the way he listens to his own heartbeat while his foot is broken (95) -- he is hardly the type to go in for leather and chains. And at the end of the novel, isn't Carrie the dominant one, since Rondal, like Rochester in Jane Eyre, is disabled? Through diversions like this, the tropes of conventional romance in Storming Heaven help to conceal the systems of male dominance in which that romance is nested, making the dominance genteel and acceptable.
Kaja Silverman suggests a distinction that is useful here between romance "discourses" and "ideologies" of male dominance. We are not aware of ideology: it is implicit, unspeakable, and slow to change, while discourse is what we explicitly say and think, and it can change rapidly. The two only indirectly affect each other. Foucault's internalized discipline operates at the level of discourse, as did the precapitalist disciplines of torture and obligation. Both, however, were shaped by similar sets of enduring ideologies.
Anne McClintock's Victorian sexologists wrote that men derive "great pleasure" from "conquering" women, while women remain coy in order to get the "intense gratification" of being vanquished (208). Saying this today would be unspeakable, but we recognize the scenario she describes as a naked version of the genteel heterosexuality acted out by Carrie and Rondal. Nor is Storming Heaven unusual: in fiction and self-help books, the submissive but emotionally demanding woman and her dominant but silently withdrawn beau are a ubiquitous motif.
While Carrie's concern that she will become a fallen woman (111), and Rondal's fear that Carrie will be like his all-powerful and unapproachable mother (246), suggest historical antecedents to this romanticized male dominance, for the most part the novel erases or hides the roots which could denaturalize that dominance. A seemingly unconnected bit of root that remains unburied is child abuse.
Rondal writes that when he hid under the bed to avoid going to work with his father in the coal mine as a boy, "Daddy took the belt to me" (21), and neither Rondal nor his mother seem to see this as abuse. Later, when Rondal's brother Talcott runs away to avoid working in the mine, "Daddy . . . wore him out with his strap" (29), and again Rondal offers no comment. In the same chapter, however, when Talcott comes back from his first day at the mine, there are "bruises all over [his] back where the boss man hit on him" (24).
The father, who has internalized the discipline of the mine, sees this as just part of Talcott's training, like the beatings he administers or the instructions he gives Rondal on working the coal face: "Don't worry," he says, "you'll git toughened up" (24). The mother, in contrast, is using a precapitalist discipline. It is all right for her husband to "wear out" Talcott with a beating, but there "aint no mother supposed to let such things happen to her younguns" (24). The plural, including Rondal who is stiff and sore from loading coal, makes it clear that the problem for her is not one of severity but agency. Children are the property of parents, and may be hurt or beaten by family but not by outsiders.
Like Rondal's family, the Boatwrights take beating children for granted: Annie accepts Glen's argument that he must beat Bone because "someone's got to love her enough to care how she turns out" (107). Alma moves back in with her unfaithful husband after "the boys started running around at night" (91), presumably so he could take over disciplining them. Annie thinks the Waddell kids "need their asses slapped" (101). Even Raylene threatens to beat Grey when she discovers him knocking a hole in her house with the trawling hook (186). Bone tells us that if Alma had heard the violent stories she was telling, she "would probably have beaten me harder" than Glen (119); again, severity does not seem to be as much at issue as parentage.
Annie leaves Glen for two weeks when she discovers that he was secretly beating Bone, breaking her bones. When she returns to him, in a family that accepts child beating as normal, she makes him "swear an oath never to raise his hand to me again" (117). It isn't, I think, that broken bones are too severe, but that he had been beating Bone without her permission. Glen is not Bone's father, so discipline, if necessary, is her responsibility. Glen knows his authority is shaky, and is "careful not to hit me when one of the aunts was visiting." With Annie present he only does so when "he could justify [it] as discipline" (111).
In that context, since Annie is obedient to her husband, even acquiescing to his disparaging opinions of her family (110), she lets him beat her daughters. She even allows Glen to break his oath and beat Bone until she bleeds, because for once her transgression is clear and blatant. Indeed, Annie blames Bone, and says, ambiguously, "I just don't know what to do," whether about Glen's viciousness, Bone's disobedience, or her sister's death is unclear (235).
Raylene, in contrast, does know. Like the other Boatwrights, she knows that Glen isn't one of them -- look at the houses he rents, and the way he moved Anney away from them out to West Greenville. When she discovers that Glen has broken his oath and exceeded his authority, not to mention "beat her [Bone] bloody," leaving bruises "all the way down to her knees," she suggests to Earle and Beau that they kill him (245).
The links between child beating and male dominance become clear in the "love triangle," for lack of a better term, among Annie, Bone, and Glen. "The notorious and dangerous Black Earle Boatwright" has warned Glen to "just watch yourself" around Annie (10-11): he "would never hurt" Annie (246) because he fears for his life if he did. Glen is able to sexually dominate Annie: for instance, he "was always reaching for Mama with sudden, wide sweeps of his arms" while courting her (35). He can easily manipulate her emotionally the way the other Boatwright men do, by playing the "overgrown boy" for whom, no matter what he does, Annie will sees herself as "born to mother, nurse, and clean up after" (23). But he is also skilled at hurting her, with a comment like "don't give me that mama shit," and then, through the very extremeness of his apology, demanding apology and sympathy from her (69).
However, Glen cannot fully control Annie as long as she loves Bone as much as she does him. "I know how much your mama loves you," he tells Bone, (not how much I love you), and bruises her arm squeezing it (70). Nor can he feel entirely secure so long as Bone's father remains unknown. As he incests Bone, he tells her she is "just like your Mama," obliterating the unknown father and, in one sense, making Bone into a surrogate Annie, one he can control completely with his hands (which simultaneously hurt and caress: 282), or, eventually, with his penis (he issues commands in time to his pelvic thrusts when he rapes her: 285). In another sense, since Annie loves Bone so much, Bone is a tool with which Glen can control Annie directly.
Allison establishes the connection with the first beating: Glen screams with rage as he hits Bone, who "screamed for Mama", while "outside the locked door," Annie "was screaming too. . . . All of us were screaming, and no one could help" (106). Glen beats Bone, and then explains himself. Knowing that she hates the word bastard, he claims Bone called him that. He drives a wedge between mother and daughter, saying that "she told me she hated me." Demanding sympathy, he tells her he has been laid off again. By the end, "Mama [is] crying in his arms"; Glen completes his symphony of control and domination by having sex with Annie. The beatings work as, but are more effective than, a hurtful insult. Since Glen cannot beat her directly like Beau does Maggie (128), he beats Annie through Bone.
Glen cannot dominate Annie completely because he has married the Boatwright family, not just an autonomous individual. The kinship ties that capitalism makes unimportant in Storming Heaven are all-important here. While steady work offered by the mines lets Rondal and Carrie become practiced at internalizing and romanticizing the violence of male dominance, only some of the women hold steady work in Allison's novel. The Boatwrights are an underclass; in James Kavanagh's terms, capitalist society has (senselessly) deemed them so valueless that they have never had the chance to become practiced at internalizing and quieting their violent resentment of their class status. Bone's uncles and cousins are constantly doing time at the county farm for some crime: only police repression keeps them in line. They are equally unpracticed at taming the overtly violent aspects of their male dominated love.
But is internalization any better? Carrie is so isolated in her individualism that it never occurs to her to fight Rondal's cruelty. Annie, like Carrie and unlike her relatives, seems unwilling to admit "who we were" (82), and even after Bone is raped, she is unable to renounce Glen. But, supported by a kinship network in which she can find some equal others, "you's" who are also "I's," she is able to dominate him occasionally, either to leave for a few weeks, or to slap his hand down and shame him after she has to feed the girls "soda crackers and ketchup" (73).
While the characters in Storming Heaven are hardly able to articulate the basis of their love, the Boatwrights are aware of an implicit contract. The women "mother, nurse, and clean up after the men" (23); in return, the men let themselves be mothered as overgrown children and love (sexually and otherwise) the women. The women serve the men, while the men need only pretend to be "a hurt little boy with just enough meanness in him to keep a woman interested" (25). Male dominance is preserved.
Glen comes as close to losing Annie as he ever does when he refuses to be mothered, with a "don't give me that mama shit. Just shut up" (69), but he recovers before she has time to get over her shock and become angry. When Alma's Wade is unfaithful to her, she moves away from him for "weeks," returning insult for insult by moving into a Black neighborhood (presumably one of the few places she could afford on one income), implying that she prefers Blacks to him (86). But even Alma cannot escape the male dominance in the contract. When Wade refuses to help her make another child or to love her, she destroys her home as he did the pretense of their love, but does not attack him.
An easy way to interpret Bone's masturbatory fantasies is to see them as unnaturally engendered by Glen's abuse. This view is difficult to support when we consider Reese, who, from the text, has not been beaten or incested by Glen, but who is "masturbating almost as often as I was," and who is also engaging in fantasies of having "terrible exciting things" done to her (174, 176).
Glen's abuse of Bone and her fantasies form two parallel, escalating cycles. As she loses control of her body and sexuality in life to Glen, culminating with his rape of her, she gains control in her fantasies. At first, she dreams of being burnt in a haystack set alight by someone else (63); after his last, most severe beating, she dreams of calling down an Apocalypse to burn up everyone in Greenville (253-54). Bone can only imagine resisting social male dominance by playing "mean sisters" (213). Likewise, "it was only in my fantasies . . . that I was able to defy Daddy Glen" (113).
Even without Glen's beatings and caresses, Bone's life would be difficult to bear. With them, it seems almost impossible. Her fantasies develop on their own, but they adapt quickly to become stories that enable her to exert imaginative control over an otherwise unbearable life. As long as the fantasy lasts, "somewhere far away a child was screaming, but right then, it was not me" (193).
Anne McClintock points out that S/M fantasies act to denaturalize power by scripting it. In Silverman's terms, S/M fantasies drag the ideological basis of sexuality into discourse. Ideology that remains silent and hidden within discourse is powerful, but to speak the ideology itself aloud is to rob it of its power, to render it ridiculous or to turn it against itself. Bone's fantasies can show us links between Glen's emotional and physical dominance, but they save Bone's life. Made powerless, the hellfire Bone is sure awaits her ("I was evil": 110) becomes God's vengeance upon all Greenville on her behalf (254). Being beaten until she is covered in "snot and misery" becomes being loved and thought wonderful for her defiance (112-13). Hating herself for being sinful and her mother for being unable to abandon Glen for her becomes redemption: "She [Mama] 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).
The ancient Roman father or paterfamilias's authority was, in theory, absolute: he had power of life and death over his wife, children, and servants. In late 1994, NPR reported that the children of a Canadian family who had agreed to be videotaped round the clock for a TV documentary had been placed in foster care after social workers saw the parents speaking abusively to the children on the tape. The change is not toward less dominance but to less obvious, more cost-effective dominance by men over women and adults over children.
The new capitalist dominance, which is slowly spreading into the working and underclasses as capitalism discovers more and more ways to take people's money, kills fewer people, but it is far more effective at isolating them and creating despair. The old dominance, most common today in the international underclass of feudal (2) countries, at least exists in a context of community, but it is far more dangerous. Neither is a good choice; only dragging the ideology of heterosexual romance into discourse, as this paper tries to do, can open the variety of choices.
When I see heterosexual couples flirting in public, I almost despair. Almost always the man handles the woman, for example trapping her against the wall for a kiss. When things get boisterous, he chases her, and she shrieks a half-hearted objection. Are these the people who will utter the unspeakable? Remember Alma.
After Alma destroyed her house, Bone stood in wonder at the wreckage, wondering if everyone had gone crazy. "Women all over Greenville County were going to smash stuff and sit down to wait for Armageddon or sunrise or something. It sounded like a good idea to me" (268). I agree.
Allison, Dorothy. Bastard out of Carolina. New York: Dutton, 1992.
_____. "Surviving Oklahoma." Out, June/July 1993, p120.
Califia, Pat. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1994.
elliott. "Review of Bastard out of Carolina." off our backs, Dec 1992, p12-13.
Giardina, Denise. Storming Heaven. New York: Ivy Books, 1988.
Kavanagh, James. "Ideology." Critical Terms for Literary Study. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Chicago: U of Chicago press, 1990. p306-320.
McClintock, Anne. "Maid To Order: Commercial S/M and Gender Power." Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson, eds. London: BFI Publishing, 1993. p207-231.
MacKinnon, Catharine. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P, 1987.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: the Dialogical Principle. Wlad Godzich, Trans. Minneapolis: U of Minnesotta press, 1984.
1. Reactionary means refusing to change as the world does: it's more precise than "conservative" or "right wing." Back
2. In feudalism, there is an aristocracy and an underclass, but no working class or bourgeoisie. El Salvador is an example. Back