Southern Grotesque

            On Wednesday I was so behind on my journal and had yet to post for Monday yet. I’ve been spending too much time on social media arguing with people for whom logic means nothing.

            That night I went to20th Century US Literature class. Scott arrived ten minutes past start time.

            We looked at Southern Grotesque literature. Of the authors that I‘d read I’d only really considered Flannery O’Connor’s themes to be grotesque. But Scott puts even Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Name Desire in that category as well, with the sickening death and everything driven by death. Blanche is worn out. There is something gendered about death. Eudora Welty’s freaks are mirrors of our monstrous selves.

            We started with the William Faulkner’s 1930 story, “A Rose for Emily. Scott had asked if anyone had read Faulkner. I had read The Sound and the Fury but had never thought of Faulkner as being grotesque. I guess though that “A Rose for Emily” proved me wrong.

            The whole town went to Miss Emily’s funeral. Was it really the whole town? The men and the women went for different reasons. Emily had been southern royalty because of slavery and had fallen from that station when slavery fell. But she remained as a monument to that time. The town had been built around people like Emily. She still mattered but nobody cared. She represented history without guilt. Noblesses oblige. She clings to her old influence even though she no longer has power. The populace is coming to terms with its past.

            The old servant is a combined cook and gardener, which is not a normal combination. He is only referred to as the Negro by the narrator on the day that he lets everyone into the house, and then he walks out the back and is never heard from again. He knows everything.

            Although Emily’s old servant is called a “Negro”, her lover from the north brought “niggers, mules and machinery” for the construction job.

            The old men in Confederate uniforms at Emily’s need to remember her falsely for the sake of their identity.

            The bedroom door is forced in a sexual metaphor.

            Emily, because her lover would not marry her, performed a sort of macabre wedding by poisoning him and then spending every night in bed with his corpse. Scott exclaimed, “This is some fucked up shit!”

            The ghost of slavery still haunts the town. The populace cannot admit the truth because it would expose them. The narrator says both “we” and “they”. Emily is described in masculine terms and as a corpse while alive.

            While Emily’s father was alive no man was good enough for her.

            She may have deliberately set up the ending after her death as a fuck you to the town.

            Modernist writers often play with time by showing how it passes differently in thought.

            Tableaus are strange poses in old photographs resulting from long exposures.

            We took our halftime break.

            Eudora Welty is both ha ha funny and funny peculiar. She has a concern with the mythic.

            “The Petrified Man”. A petrified man could be a mummy but in this case he’s a fake freak in a show. No one would publish the story at first so she kept editing it to make it funnier.

            There is a recording on Youtube of Welty reading one of her stories. She’s all about speed patterns.

            The beauty salon is a filthy place where the stylists smoke while they are working. It’s homo-social space that’s tacky like a whorehouse. The customers are being “gratified” and it sounds perversely sexual.

            A customer worries that she caught dandruff from having sex with her husband, as if it were an STD.

            The women talk about their husbands as if they control them, but they don’t.

            Four women were raped by the petrified man. The reward for him is $500, which means that each of the victims is worth $125 each.

            A wild haired lady is like Medusa. Medusa was transformed into a Gorgon as punishment for being raped. Myths are not necessarily a reflection of what’s going on.

            Women do funny and disturbing things to one another in this story.

            The women beat the little boy up because he is a future man. He already knows he has power.

            We looked at Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”. There are disabled people in her work all the time because of her own condition.

            One can’t keep secrets from good country people. The good country people in the story are not good.

            O’Connor is interested in Descartes.

I mentioned that there is an expression that for a man, a woman as a wife is a

wooden leg. Scott was surprised, as he’d never heard that before. I suggested that the Bible salesman stealing the woman’s leg is a symbolic wedding.

            As I was getting ready to leave, Scott came up to talk with me about the idea that a wife is a wooden leg. He said it reminded him of Gloria Steinem’s famous quote that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

            The weird thing is that when I went home and did a search, I couldn’t find a single reference to a wife being a metaphorical wooden leg for a man. I know I’m not imagining it and that I heard it long before the internet.