"Getting above your raising" : the role of social class and status in the fiction of Lee Smith

358 Pages·2017·1.3 MB·English

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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2002
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Sharon Elizabeth Colley
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Colley, Sharon Elizabeth, ""Getting above your raising" : the role of social class and status in the fiction of
Lee Smith" (2002). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3921.
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“GETTING ABOVE YOUR RAISING”:
THE ROLE OF SOCIAL CLASS AND STATUS
IN THE FICTION OF LEE SMITH
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
The Department of English
by
Sharon Elizabeth Colley
B.A., Mercer University, 1991
M.A., University of Tennessee, 1993
May, 2002
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Graduate English Department of Louisiana State University
for allowing me the opportunity to pursue the doctorate and complete this degree. I especially
wish to thank my dissertation committee of Dr. Peggy Prenshaw, Dr. Rick Moreland, Dr.
Rebecca Saunders, and Dr. Dave Smith, as well as the staff of the Middleton Library, for their
assistance and support.
My dissertation director, Dr. John Lowe, has been a source of unfailing
encouragement and insightful guidance during the writing of this document. I greatly
appreciate his advice and patient support throughout the writing process.
I also would like to thank my family and friends for their encouragement and patience
during the last few years. While those deserving thanks are too many to name here, some who
deserve a special “thank you” are: Bethany Clough, who now knows much more about Lee
Smith than any other accountant in America; my sister, Laura Herrin, who has picked me up
from the airport numerous times and made me feel part of her child’s life, despite our
distance; my cousin, Monica Skidmore, who understands why this process was difficult; my
fellow academic, Helen Sugarman, for her calm and steady friendship; Scott Smiley, who
listened patiently to my many crises; and my grandfather, Lomas Hinkle, who always
encouraged his grandchildren to get all the education they could. You all mean so much to
me; thank you.
Perhaps most of all, however, I’d like to thank my parents, Bill and Peggy Colley, for
their emotional and, at times, financial support during the graduate school years. You knew I
could succeed when I didn’t; thank you for being “the wind beneath my wings.”
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

ABSTRACT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv

CHAPTER
ONE Introduction: Class, Classifying, and Classy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

TWO “Who Are Your People?”: Lee Smith’s Relationship
to the Appalachian South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

THREE Country Come to Town: Social Structures in Lee Smith’s Small
Towns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

FOUR “Raised to Leave”: Education in Lee Smith Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

FIVE “How Country Are You?”: Taste in Lee Smith’s Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

LEE SMITH BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

SECONDARY SOURCE BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

APPENDIX: INTERVIEW WITH LEE SMITH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332

VITA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352

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ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines the role of social class and status in the fiction of
contemporary novelist and short story writer, Lee Smith. As discussed in the Introduction, the
study defines social class broadly, not limiting it to production, but also not discarding its
economic underpinning. Max Weber’s definition of class as “life chances” provides the
starting point; any resources that can improve a person’s position in the market place
positively impact their “life chances.” The resources appearing most often in Smith’s fiction
include economic capital and property, as well as education, family connections, and
occupational status. The discussion also builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s position that taste plays a
crucial role in social class status, shaping not only individuals’ life chances but also their
perspectives and aesthetics.
Chapter two explores Lee Smith’s relationship to her childhood home and signature
setting of Appalachia, first by examining her personal history in the region and then by
exploring the connection of social class to sources for her texts. Indirect sources include local
color fiction and some of the stereotypical images it promulgated; direct sources consist of a
sampling of source texts from one Smith novels, The Devil’s Dream. Chapter three
systematically surveys the elements of social differentiation within her texts by utilizing
social histories of the region; resources covered include kinship, land ownership, and religion.
The chapter also examines the varieties of small towns in Smith’s fiction, including the stock
Southern town, the coal-company town, the county seat town and the boom town.
Chapters four and five examine more closely two crucial element yet less tangible
elements of social structuring in Smith’s work—education and taste. Chapter four accesses
scholarship on social class and education, including liberal, reproduction, and resistance
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theory, to discuss the difficulties of physical and social access to schooling in Smith’s work.
Chapter five incorporates Bourdieu’s theory of taste and Richard Peterson’s concept of the
cultural omnivore, which can be considered an Americanization of Bourdieu’s concept of
cultural capital, to examine the relationship of social class to one of Smith’s primary themes,
self-creation.
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: CLASS, CLASSIFYING, AND CLASSY

In Lee Smith’s critically acclaimed, epistolary novel, Fair and Tender Ladies (1988),
protagonist Ivy Rowe is an Appalachian native, born at the beginning of the twentieth century
in the mountains near Sugar Fork, Virginia. Though Ivy identifies with the mountain
community of her childhood, she interacts with individuals from a variety of social classes
and status groups throughout her life. Her experiences with these diverse economic structures
and social positions suggest the recurrent class and status tensions of Appalachia and the
larger South. Ivy’s mother, Maude, was originally a “town girl” from Rich Valley before she
eloped with John Arthur Rowe, Ivy’s mountain man father. Alienated from Maude’s rich
father by her rebellion, the farming family struggles to survive when John Arthur is first
incapacitated by and then slowly dies of a heart condition. After his death, the family moves
to an early twentieth century boom town and works in the boarding house of a family friend,
Geneva Hunt; various guests at the house include a local judge, teachers, a traveling
evangelist, and lumber mill officials. After Ivy’s mother dies, she moves to a highly stratified
coal company town to live with her upwardly mobile sister and brother-in-law. They
encourage Ivy to date a mine owner’s son, which she does, though the man perceives her as a
mistress rather than as wife material. Ivy also befriends a coal town neighbor whose husband
was seriously injured by and is later killed in a mining accident; eventually, this friend
becomes a traveling union organizer. For her part, Ivy marries a man from her home
community and returns to her family’s mountain farm. However, she encourages her children
to leave the mountain farm for schooling and helps a teacher from New York revitalize a
nearby settlement school. Though Ivy never leaves her mountainous corner of Virginia, her
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story includes representatives from a wide variety of class, status, and cultural backgrounds
whose experiences limit and shape their opportunities and their worldviews.
As this incomplete sketch of Smith’s novel indicates, her Appalachian characters may
originate in a relatively classless folk culture, but their social worlds are seldom homologous.
Social class and status shape the lives of her characters, at times determining and at times
subtly altering their options and perspectives. Previous studies have argued persuasively that
the relationship between the individual and the community is a recurring theme in Smith’s
fiction (Campbell 94-96; Wagner-Martin 28; etc.). This dissertation extends and complicates
the discussion by further examining social class and status in Smith’s communities to
determine its effects on the life chances and the relationships of Smith’s characters.
Defining “class” in the early twenty-first century United States is a complex project,
dependent on audience and context. For sociologists, class remains an economic relationship.
For Marxists, class is traditionally the economic relationship of a group to the means of
production; neo-Marxists complicate the approach with elements such as culture, but retain
the same economic premise. In popular usage, “class” may indicate a combination of
occupational prestige, income, and education, indices of power in the market that do not
necessarily correlate with a relationship to the means of production, though they may connect
with it.
Many Americans separate class even further from the pure Marxist definition by
associating the term with style, taste, and morality. For example, the pejoratively labeled
“white trash” class fraction in the contemporary American South is not primarily defined by
their position as wage laborers, though occupational status and power may be the foundation
for their social location and lifestyle. Instead, these people are considered “trashy” because
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they drink too much, chew Redman, do not keep their yards tidy, beat their children, and/or
wear unflattering tube tops. “Trashy” people often have little income, less education, and
almost no social prestige, but their taste and perceived immorality are identified by middle
and upper class Southerners as a justification and reason for their lower class status.
Therefore, “social class” can be defined as a measure of social and economic power deriving
from a variety of sources, including prestige and appropriate consumption, rather than solely
from the relationship to the means of production.
Yet, this approach should not negate the economic connections of social class. While
wealth is not the only measure of social class status in the American South, it plays an
inescapable role in determining social power. For example, though the Southern lady has
“class” because of her genteel ways, those manners originated in a relatively privileged
context. Anne Firor Scott observes in The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-
1930 (1970) that typically “definitions of what was ladylike were reserved for women of the
elite group, not for wives of mill workers or Negro maids” (xi). Though the image of the
Southern lady has filtered down to women in many social classes, as Anne Goodwyn Jones
observes in Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South 1859-1936 (1981),
the ideal Southern lady historically represents the “aristocratic” class (5). An association with
the mythical Tara and landed gentry hovers in the background of the traditional icon. The
Southern lady’s noblesse obliges codes not just for kindness and grace but also for aristocracy
and deserving, if not possessing, wealth. Regardless of her economic status, the socially
powerful image of the Southern lady is consistently connected with both class (economic) and
status (prestige) privilege.
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In this dissertation, I define social class broadly, not limiting it to production-related
issues, but also not discarding the frequent underpinning of economics. Max Weber’s
discussion of “life chances” in the market provides the starting point for the discussion; any
resource that can improve an individual’s position in the market place, thereby giving them
additional options and power in their lives, can impact their “life chances.” These resources
include economic capital and property, as well as education, family connections, and aesthetic
taste. While these latter elements are more generally identified as status rather than class
markers, economic resources often shape them; Smith’s mountain characters, for example,
typically have less education than wealthier town characters because they do not have the
resources to travel for further study. Furthermore, Pierre Bourdieu has argued that status often
provides a cover for class, as the judgment about the “white trash” or “undeserving poor”
indicate. This broader definition of social class resources allows for a more nuanced and
complete discussion of the experience of social class in Lee Smith’s work.
Additionally, my dissertation builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s assertion that aesthetic taste
plays a crucial role in social class status. Arguing that the combination of resources
(economic, social, and cultural) that an individual has, in conjunction with their pattern of
social mobility, creates their worldview, Bourdieu provides a framework for discussing how
class-based taste shapes an individual’s perceptions and interactions with others. Beginning
with these basic perspectives, I examine the lived experience of social class in Smith’s fiction,
and discuss how the fluctuating markers of class and status empower and limit the lives of her
Southern and Appalachian characters.

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