48 pages • 1 hour read
Bill Cleaver, Vera CleaverWhere the Lilies Bloom
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Vera Cleaver and Bill Cleaver
Neither Vera Cleaver nor her husband Bill Cleaver grew up in Appalachia; Vera was raised in South Dakota, while Bill grew up predominantly in British Columbia. Both highly valued education throughout their youth, spending a majority of their time in public libraries. This emphasis placed on knowledge is evidenced in the novel’s protagonist, Mary Call, who feels great disdain for ignorance and a hunger for education.
The authors often wrote female protagonists who are competent, scornful of gendered expectations, and witty. These narrators face challenges that they inevitably overcome with their resourcefulness. They navigate poverty with dignity and gusto, often displaying a connection and reverence for the land, their family, and faith. The authors balance portraying the reality of poverty alongside happy, fairy-tale endings. This has also raised the criticism that Where the Lilies Bloom perpetuates the romanticized narrative of a strong Appalachian woman defeating the forces of poverty, ignorance, and violence through her clever resourcefulness, especially by authors who are not from the region.
Although the Cleavers were not personally familiar with Appalachian life, they carried out extensive research on the cultural and social context of the region, interweaving Appalachian jargon and detailed depictions of wildcrafting throughout the novel. The novel is not set in a specific time period, however; it is likely to be between the 1930s and the 1950s due to the discussion of technologies such as washing machines and the fact that this form of sharecropping faded in the US by the 1960s.
Cultural Context: Appalachia
The Appalachian Mountains run along the eastern coast of North America from Canada to Alabama. The Great Smoky Mountains, where the novel takes place, are part of the Appalachian Mountain system. The general Appalachia region gained widespread notoriety during the 1960s, especially during John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, which televised life in impoverished West Virginia. The difficult economic situation can be traced to the aftermath of the Civil War, including the rise of the sharecropping system (an arrangement in which a tenant farmer pays rent with a share of their crops) wherein the financial disparity between landowners and poor farmers, both white and Black, increased.
To this day, stigmas exist about people from Appalachia, centering on stereotypes such as inbreeding and associating poverty with ignorance, squalor, and a lack of moral depth. The novel fights these associations; through Mary Call and her siblings, the Cleavers convey that poverty does not signify ignorance or a lack of complexity in terms of intellect, personality, and ability to think critically and reflectively. This novel centers on the perspectives and concerns of rural, southern Appalachian people, offering points of view about tenant sharecropping, landownership, and the tension between town life and rural living. Christian thought is portrayed as a complex force in the novel, being both weaponized as a tool of judgment and pity by the town-dwelling character of Mrs. Connell and used as a supportive source by Mary Call.
Appalachian identity includes cultural and economic markers such as common methods of making money, gender expectations, and religion. Values that are generally held in high regard in this area include religion, pride, and self-reliance, all of which are demonstrated in the novel. An ability to appreciate beauty, as well as a sense of humor, are also looked upon favorably in this culture. These are all generalizations, however, and the story of one family cannot capture a full picture of communal identity.
In the novel, Wildcrafting becomes the family’s main source of income. Due to the region’s diversity of plant life, many pharmaceutical companies imported their plants from Appalachia (even today, over one fourth of American medicine comes from native plants across the country). Understanding of the various medicinal properties of the regional plants came overwhelmingly from Indigenous knowledge, including the Cherokee nation. Indigenous nations are never mentioned in the novel.
