51 pages • 1 hour read
Dorothy AllisonBastard Out Of Carolina
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Strength of Familial Bonds
The strength of familial bonds is an important theme in Bastard out of Carolina, but also in Dorothy Allison’s writing as a whole. Allison is deeply invested in representing the lives of the working poor and working classes with humanity and nuance: Although these characters (like Allison’s own family) might lack resources, the strength of their familial bonds is unwavering. Through this, Allison means to suggest that when poverty is seen only through the lens of scarcity, it is easy to overlook the ways in which the impoverished find strength and resilience. In addition to helping one another with basic needs such as childcare, Bone’s family members provide one another with respect and support that they do not always receive from their community, and for Bone in particular her extended family becomes a source of solace as she endures years of abuse.
The way that social class impacts upbringing and identity is a key thematic interest for Dorothy Allison, and a desire to depict the working poor and working classes with dignity was a large part of the impetus for this novel. The Boatwright family is a tight-knit clan which is characterized by a spirit of mutual aid and support. Allison, whose graduate work was in urban anthropology (and also grew up poor) is familiar with the wide body of research on class and family dynamics, and she understands both from an academic and a personal standpoint that these kinds of strong family bonds are typical amongst the working classes. Her representation of the Boatwright family here is thus a meta-argument about the nature of interdependent bonds within working class and working poor communities. Glen’s family provides a marked contrast: They are more affluent, but not nearly as bonded, and part of Glen’s anger is the product of growing up in a household in which he was not appreciated or supported by these affluent people.
The strong familial bonds within the Boatwright family are responsible for the support that Anney and her siblings provide for one another, but they also serve another function. This family is stigmatized for its lack of financial resources and for its cultural dissimilarity to the middle class. Anney, Bone, and others are dismissed as “trash” by many of the people that they meet, and it is thus only within their family that they are treated with respect and dignity. Raylene, Earle, Bone, and other members of the Boatwright clan are arguably eccentric and do not necessarily live in to societal acceptability standards or behavioral norms, and yet they are all accepted and valued for who they are. Bone feels this acceptance too, noting: “I felt mean and powerful and proud of all of us, all the Boatwrights who had ever gone to jail, fought back when they hadn’t a chance, and still held onto their pride” (217).
The Boatwrights are also Bone’s primary support network. This extended-family group becomes increasingly important as Glen’s abuse intensifies and Bone realizes that her mother will never willingly put a stop to the beatings or the molestation. Bone instead finds love and acceptance from Granny, Alma, Ruth, Raylene, Earle, and others. Raylene, because she exists outside of traditional gender norms in a way that Bone can relate to becomes an additionally important role model, and her example will show Bone that it is possible to be happy without becoming a wife or a mother.
Abuse and Coming of Age
The way that abuse impacts coming of age is perhaps Bastard out of Carolina’s most overt theme, and it is personal for Dorothy Allison: The novel is autobiographical and stays relatively true to Allison’s own experience of childhood physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather. The character of Glen, in no small part because he is modeled on a real person, is a near-perfect embodiment of the cycle of domestic abuse. The impact that he has on Bone and her family is both devastating and wide-reaching: His abuse damages Bone, but also fractures her family.
Glen sexually abuses Bone for the first time on the night that her mother delivers her stillborn brother Glen Jr. There is, however, foreshadowing prior to this incident: Glenn comments on how beautiful Anney’s daughters must be after meeting her, and his troubled intensity indicates, to Anney’s family if not to her, some kind of underlying emotional instability. Glen feels a keen sense of his own inferiority, both because his own family members are so successful and because he cannot even manage to keep the most menial of jobs. He directs his inner rage outwards, subjecting Bone to brutal beatings, and then apologizes in theatrical displays of grief and tears: “Daddy Glen had said he was sorry, begged, wept, and swore never to hurt me again” (117). Those tearful apologies are typically followed by periods of relative calm, but then also a recalibration of the way that Glen interprets the abusive incident: Not possessing the capacity for true accountability, he begins to blame Bone for provoking his response, and he ultimately decides that he was not in the wrong.
The impact that this abuse has on Bone is profound and multi-layered. Because Glen gaslights her, blames her for the abuse, and often engages in behavior (like hugs that are too long and too tight) that Bone cannot quite identify as assault, Bone questions her version of abusive events. About Glen’s first instance of abuse, she muses “I remembered those moments in the hospital parking lot like a bad dream” (51). She is not sure if it really happened or not and if it did, she wonders if she might have encouraged it somehow. Glen, because he so often blames her for the abuse, instills in her this feeling of self-blame, and because she is sure that she somehow, as he claims, “wanted it,” she also feels a sense of increasing shame. The abuse spans Bone’s childhood and adolescence, and because so much of Glen’s victimization of her is concurrent with puberty, it happens as she is (in a completely developmentally appropriate manner) exploring her own sexuality. This creates a profound feeling of confusion for Bone, who often cannot separate her own desire from her abuse. Although Glen is the sole aggressor and instigates each instance of sexual assault and harassment, he has so convinced her that these encounters are her fault that she believes him and wonders what is wrong with her.
Glen’s abuse also impacts the family. He isolates Anney, Reese, and Bone from the Boatwrights and subjects them to manipulation and control tactics. The impact of his abuse on the family is most evident in Anney’s behavior, for she is so loath to lose him that she becomes an enabler, forgiving even the assaults to which she bears witness, eventually even forgiving the rape whose aftermath she walks in on. Anney’s inability to hold Glen accountable ruins her relationship with her daughter and is ultimately responsible for the complete fracture of the family: After Glen rapes Bone, Anney leaves with him. Glen had always wanted to isolate Anney not only from the Boatwrights, but also from Bone, whose bond with Anney was a source of envy, and ultimately he was successful.
The Intersections of Class and Gender
The Intersections of Class and Gender is an important theme not only in Bastard out of Carolina, but in Allison’s other texts as well. This thematic focal point is rooted in Allison’s own experiences as a poor, Appalachian woman, and the desire to tell that story was a major part of Allison choice to become a writer. The feminist and Marxist theories to which she was first exposed as an undergraduate illuminated her own coming-of-age years and helped her to understand the structural nature of both class-based and gendered oppression. Because so many of the literary depictions of poverty that she encountered focused on men, it was important to Allison to shed light on the way that women experience poverty, and Bastard out of Carolina, although autobiographical, should also be read as a commentary on The Intersections of Class and Gender, writ large. Although each of the female characters in some way sheds light on the gendered experience of poverty in the rural South, it is particularly evident in the characterization of Anney, Bone, and Raylene.
Anney is introduced through the framework of class: Bristling at the label “trash,” Anney works tirelessly, although not successfully, to change Bone’s birth certificate so that she will be listed as legitimate. Having grown up in the large, poor Boatwright family in extreme poverty (they often did not have enough to eat) she acutely feels the stigma of her class position. Class-based prejudice has been part of her life since childhood, (although she is only 15 when the novel begins) and she experiences it as a burden. Anney’s particularly gendered experience of poverty is also evident in her career: She has few options as an uneducated teenage mother, and not liking mill work she takes a position in a café. She will keep this waitressing job for the entirety of the novel, and although she has steady work (and is herself a hard worker) this job will not allow her to elevate her class position, and she will always struggle to make ends meet and pay bills. This is a subtle indictment of the American dream, for no amount of hard work on Anney’s part will allow her to pull herself “up by her bootstraps” and she remains trapped in generational poverty. Although jobs were hard to come by for everyone in the working classes, jobs for women were even scarcer, and Anney’s waitressing job represents one of the few options that would have been available to a woman in her position.
For Bone, The Intersections of Class and Gender includes an additional focus on sexuality. She is a fictionalized version of Dorothy Allison herself, who came of age during the 1950s in a community that was traditional and patriarchal. Roles for women and men were starkly defined, and Allison figured out quickly that she did not fit neatly into the gendered category that was supposed to occupy. She was not conventionally attractive, she was not attracted to men, and did not see herself as traditionally feminine. Bone reflects many of these qualities, and particularly in her affinity towards her uncles, Bone is a girl more interested in masculinity than femininity: She enjoys wearing her uncles’ castoff clothing, is interested in working with tools, and does not engage in traditionally gendered play activities like dolls or dress-up. Although lesbian sexuality is not as ostensible a focus as it was for Allison during her own adolescence, Bone’s confusion about the border between her own sexuality and sexual abuse does take center stage, particularly as she reaches adolescence. Bone has to figure out all of this against the backdrop of her family’s poverty and struggles to define herself without internalizing the shame she feels, like Anney, at being labeled “trash.” She experiences prejudice from Glen’s family, at school, and from her own friend Shannon. At home too, she struggles, and because Glen is so often out of work, the family does not always have adequate food. Bone observes that “Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food” (71). She feels shame because of her abuse, because of her sexuality, and because she is poor, and part of her coming-of-age arc will be learning to define herself without this shame.
Raylene’s character, although she exists outside of the boundaries of traditional gender roles, does not openly come out as gay until the novel’s conclusion. A solitary, unmarried woman, she eventually reveals that she had once loved someone, another woman, but that the woman had chosen her own family over Raylene. Raylene for a time lived as a man (while working at a carnival) and also worked in the traditionally masculine space of the mill, although not, as she would have liked to, as a mechanic, but just as a laborer. She gardens, fishes, and is generally self-sufficient. She is neither a mother nor a wife and does not present as traditionally feminine. Like Anney, her options are limited both by being a woman and by being poor, and although she is happy and does not struggle to support herself, her very lifestyle speaks to both her gender and class positions. And yet, like so many in the Boatwright clan, Raylene is a supportive, kind, respectful member of the family. She helps her siblings by babysitting and is one of Bone’s primary role models supportive figures.
