Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake and the Birth of a Nation

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Coming Home, Staying Put, and Learning to Fiddle: Heroism and Place in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.

The plays of Tennessee Williams reflect a specific period in development and understanding of gender roles, though his characters occasionally cross the bounds of traditional and challenge the position of women in the mid-twentieth century America. This paper focuses on two of his most well-known plays, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and their central female characters – Blanche DuBois and Maggie the Cat, respectively. These characters’ actions highlight the performative nature of gender, and challenge the traditional gender roles of the 1950s. Introduced into feminist theory by the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, the notion of performative gender indicates that gender is a social construct which is created by the very action of performing it. It follows, then, that gender roles are conditioned by sociohistorical circumstances, which are subject to change. Both Blanche and Maggie manage to play with their assigned role, and subvert it to an extent. Because of this they exceed the limits of traditional, but due to their environment, never quite reach modernity, which ultimately makes them trapped in-between.

Trapped Between Traditional and Modern: Gender Roles in Tennessee Williams’ Plays a Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

With its history of slavery and racial conflict, war and defeat, segregation and lynching, the South is defined by violence and aggression on a personal and community level. This experience defined Southern identity and shaped its literature to mirror the sense of frustration, guilt and shame bursting from the heart of seemingly peaceful, ordered and decent communities. Though some authors tend to see violence as a necessary transgression that will, eventually, through painful sacrifice, lay the foundation of a renewed world, others regard it as a trap or a vicious circle which does not allow the South to grow out of the illusion of a glorious past and accept present changes. William Faulkner’ short story "Dry September" and Harper Lee’s novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" deal with an alleged accusation of rape, the victim being a white woman, and the culprit, a black man. Focusing more on the white community’s attitude and telling the story from limited perspectives, the two texts investigate less the black man’s tragedy, dwelling more on the white people’s reaction and the manner in which white Southern identity and white supremacy are constructed on a foundation of violence and intolerance.

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Racial Violence in William Faulkner’s Dry September and Harper Lee’s to Kill a Mockingbird

Dealing with the roots of Yoknapatawpha, the preceding chapter opened, among other things, a discursive space on the issues Faulkner’s fictional as well as the actual South was struggling with—race and gender subordination resting on the stereotypical and biased interpretation. This chapter attempts to further the insights touched upon in the previous chapter by exploring regional, i.e., Southern, gender, and race concepts and issues Yoknapatawpha was “burdened” with: the idea of white Southern womanhood and the various aspects of Southern “whiteness” as a property ideology. Faulkner made an enormous effort to understand the vicissitudes of Southern race issues in two of his masterpieces—Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, both discussing the idea of “whiteness” as a property ideology as the interaction between race and property that establishes “a form of property contingent on race” (Harris 1993, 1716).

Kathryn Lee Seidel

Papers

The Southern Belle in the American Novel.