Date of Graduation

2008

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

This study engages the short stories and novels of three contemporary fiction writers: acclaimed native West Virginians Denise Giardina and Breece D’J Pancake, and Laura Albert, a New York City native who, for a time, published under the pseudonym JT LeRoy. Using West Virginia as their settings, these authors have created Mountain State characters whose stratified marginality in heteronormative Appalachian society stems from their failure to meet traditional expectations of gender and sexuality. Those multiply marginal characters in West Virginia fiction who best establish a general accord do so through benign public personae, ancillary labor occupations and supportive kinship roles. They abide by the social codes and cooperate in the exchanges imposed on them. Others among the multi-marginal refuse hetero-masculine imperatives and maintain a more candid public existence by refusing conscription into the exchange of the feminine. They publicize their sexuality, balk at gender compliance, defy prescriptions of job suitability and rewrite the kinship code. Consequently, they exacerbate the risks of social ostracism and violent reprisal. Few of the multi-marginal characters gravitate to either extreme—complete resistance or full acquiescence. Most plot a judicious course, a prudent balance of gains and losses, negative and positive strategies that may include pandering and ingratiation as well as assertive independence. In Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, Giardina writes about West Virginia’s coal mining history, infusing her narratives with meticulously researched historical realism. Her novels span a century of life in the Appalachian coal camps. Her settings include coal communities on the West Virginia/Kentucky border, but the primary action takes place in West Virginia. Her stories detail the personal struggles endemic to the form of internal colonialism that outsiders have imposed on West Virginia through extraction industries. Giardina creates multi-marginal characters who, for the most part, forego personal autonomy for the sake of family and community solidarity against outsider exploitation. With the possible exception of Ruby Day, Giardina takes an evenhanded approach with her most disenfranchised characters. She neither vilifies nor glorifies them, but neither does she endow them with agency to reveal themselves. Instead Giardina remands her sexually anomalous characters to the closet, hinting at their difference through decorous details and intriguing innuendo. In The Collected Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, the author draws a circumscribed picture of life in rural West Virginia communities of the 1960s and 1970s. Pancake foregrounds the struggles of heterosexual males whose local authority overrides and minimizes their own marginality in the culture at large. Within these stories, multi-marginal characters who confront rural masculine dominance are, with rare exception, secondary or minor characters. Pancake’s sex-gender iconoclasts often challenge the tenuous power held by the masculine hegemony, risking violent retribution in the name of personal independence. His main characters adamantly uphold the tenets of hetero-masculinity and exhibit little to no tolerance for divergence toward anything or anyone considered feminine. Yet his stories also detail masculine crises and expose the structural weaknesses of patriarchal ideology. In Sarah, Laura Albert enlists the multiply marginalized as primary characters. She foregrounds the prostitutes (female, male and transvestite) who serve the pimps and service the johns in two West Virginia truckstop-bordellos. Ironically, the denizens of these bizarre dystopias faithfully reenact much of heteronormativity’s traditional structure, albeit in travestied display. Masculinity reigns supreme, patriarchy determines social status, and women and children play subservient roles. Albert presents a carnivalesque rendition of heteronormative socio-sexual power by invoking West Virginia stereotypes to ventriloquize the voices of sex-gender outlaws. She draws upon the image of West Virginia as fully known yet completely unknowable, and through that maneuver unleashes fantastical characterizations and implausible scenarios that a mainstream reading public might comfortably consume as authentic depictions of West Virginia life. These three authors—Giardina, Pancake and Albert—provide an appropriately diverse cross-section of West Virginia fiction’s multi-marginal characters ripe for analysis. Using a synthesis of diverse strategies, this study builds on Foucault’s formulation of disciplinary technologies and normalization procedures. Beginning there, the dissertation engages the racist dimensions of Enlightenment humanism and proceeds to postcolonial criticism of colonialist/imperialist strategies and practices, particularly as they apply to social anomalies: spaces and persons. A discussion of nationalism follows and leads into a consideration of both the “idea” and the “invention” of Appalachia as reflected in the region’s marginal place in the nation’s history and culture, followed by specifics of West Virginia’s unique and central position in Appalachia and the state’s status as an “internal colony.” (Abstract shortened by UMI.).

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