Southern Women Storytellers

What is the Geography of the South?  Many distinct and separate regions Mississippi Delta Georgia Woods Louisiana Bayous Florida Beaches Appalachian Mountains

People and Places of the South  White  Black  Urban  Rural  Lower-class  Middle-class  Historical  Modern

Southern Influences  Migrants  Preachers  Politicians  Music  Literature

The “Southern Woman Writer”  Distinctions: A subgenre of American fiction that is associated mostly with women born around the beginning of the 20 th century to mid 20 th century Strongly influenced by traditions of earlier writers (Hurston, Faulkner, Wright…)

Storytellers  Southern writers are storytellers first and foremost  Their style is to encourage readers to read between the lines – indirect storytelling  Their stories are filled with Biblical allusions, quotes, religion, dialect and folklore  Writers include details of everyday life, local nature, specific habits of people, specific places

Recurrent Themes  Alcohol  Violence (often at gunpoint)  Weight of the past  Music – blues, jazz, gospel, bluegrass  Self-righteous defense of slavery  Black-White relationships  Sexuality  Human oddities (misfits)  Humor

Prominent names  1920s – 1930s William Faulkner Erskine Caldwell Robert Penn Warren Katherine Anne Porter Zora Neale Hurston Richard Wright  1930s – 1950s Flannery O’Connor Eudora Welty Lillian Hellman Tennessee Williams Truman Capote Tillie Olsen  1960s – 1980s Alice Walker Mary Hood Dorothy Allison

What traits characterize Southern Women writers? Southern women tell their tales… Lower-class women, not qualified as “ladies” had the freedom to speak out Strong, capable, enduring survivors Stubborn and rebellious Although sheltered, they managed a rich inner life

Eudora Welty (1909–2001)  Well-loved writer  Wrote about rural Mississippi  Worked for Federal Works Project as photographer  Close observer of her surroundings  Characters: comic, eccentric, charming, and grotesque  Careful use of dialect and speech intonations

“A Genius of Human Relationships”  Eudora Welty took many photos during the Depression, when she worked as a publicity agent for the WPA. From she traveled across rural Mississippi taking photographs and documenting rural lives.

Eudora Welty Photographs “Home By Dark” Yalobusha County 1936 (Courtesy Eudora Welty LLC and Mississippi Department of Archives and History) What does this photograph tell us about how Eudora Welty views the south?

Welty’s view of humankind Side Show, State Fair, 1939

“Home with Bottle-trees”  This photograph by Welty, of a home in Simpson County, reflects a folk belief that "bottle-trees" — trees on whose limbs bottles have been placed — will trap evil spirits that might try to get in the house. © Eudora Welty Collection Mississippi Department of Archives and History

Reading the Images… What does this image tell us about life in Mississippi? What kind of life do these people lead?

"[My snapshots] were taken spontaneously – to catch something as I came upon it, something that spoke of life going on around me. A snapshot's now or never."

Sunday School, Holiness Church, Jackson, 1935

Connecting the Image to Text In a 1989 interview, Welty was asked what an “outsider” might think when viewing her photos. “They might or might not know that poverty in Mississippi, white and black, really didn’t have too much to do with the Depression. It was ongoing. I took pictures of our poverty because that was reality, and I was recording it. The photographs speak for themselves. The same is true for my stories.”