Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
12-2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
English
Major Professor
Thomas F. Haddox
Committee Members
William J. Hardwig, Mary E. Papke, Robert D. Bland
Abstract
Women have always worked, but southern women have been uniquely confined to invisible work and leisure in collective myths of gendered labor history. This project explores labors of motherhood, domestic labor, sexual labor, labors of care, and labors of womanhood as they are depicted in southern literature and in conversation with materialist feminist theory and labor history. In a region marked by higher rates of poverty, religiosity that often shapes social patterns of families and behavior, and increased challenges on the social condition of motherhood, women in southern literature often seem to resist the demands of exploitative labor in ways available to them—psychologically, by withholding work, or by refusing to meet the demands of labor brought on by forces rendered invisible. By widening definitions of what constitutes labor and refusing the outright distinction of domestic labor from formal or paid labor, southern literature becomes a site of cultural and economic negotiation and re-negotiation alongside widening economic disparities, social justice movements, and environmental collapse. Focusing on labor in the lives of southern women in fiction challenges cultural myths and archetypes that have long shaped how women’s obligations and positionalities in southern texts are presented in relation to work. Beginning with major southern writers of the Depression era, this project begins by positioning William Faulkner’s women alongside and counter to Ellen Glasgow and Evelyn Scott’s women characters, exploring how southern women resist the demands of reproductive labor and launch “subtle strikes.” Then, it examines the aesthetic and narrative form of refusing labor, exploring humor and unruliness as resistances in the work of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and their more contemporary inheritors. For Appalachian historical fiction writers such as Ron Rash, Denise Giardina, and Amy Greene, women’s domestic strife is often sidelined to focus on legitimized formal sites of labor exploitation at the expense of making women’s labor inescapable. In contemporary literature such as the work of Dorothy Allison and Jesmyn Ward, motherhood and maternal abandonment should be transformed into sites of labor negotiation. Southern women have always worked, but their subtle protests of exploitative working conditions have long been overlooked.
Recommended Citation
Bryan, Rachel Erin, "Bone Tired: Resisting Labor in Southern Women’s Fiction. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2023.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/9095