Chapter 4 - Hungry Women and Horny Men

Summary

While the first three chapters focus on formal innovations developed by middle-class writers who strove to contest other middle-class writers’ classist portrayals of poor white southerners, the fourth chapter considers techniques pioneered by authors who grew up poor, concentrating on literary devices designed to rebut deep-rooted narratives about poor white southerners’ unhealthy appetites. Reading Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina and Barbara Robinette Moss’s memoir Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter in light of the rise of southern foodways—in 1999, the year Moss published her memoir, the Southern Foodways Alliance was founded and USA Today named Paula Deen’s restaurant The Lady and Sons the International Meal of the Year—I explore how these authors wrote hunger into the bodies of their texts. I also examine how Allison’s and Moss’s works push back against male grit lit writers’ depictions of delectable poor white women by presenting decidedly inedible female characters, as Allison’s heroine’s nickname—Bone—suggests.