Bruce Harvey

Modern Southern Fiction

 

Lee Smith Fair and Tender Ladies Review

 

 

--epistolary (letter narration) tradition: goes back to the 18^th-century

 

--but made most famous last several decades by Alice Walker in The Color Purple

 

--gives a sense of “voice” of character

 

--but also fascination of letters as memorials to identity/relationships/a community

 

--novel opposes land/spring/pastoral/folksy community (hidden realm/isolation)

 

--to change/modernization/loss of community (growth/mobility)

 

--the quilt, as symbol, mediates between hidden realm and public world of Appalachia exhibited (the daughter wants to display the quilt)

 

--Smith, herself, wants to preserve and present that folksy world (or what I, moving beyond analysis of the novel per se, more psychologically and almost metaphysically, defined as a contrast between the deep dark woods and the world of malls/commodities--but it could be the ocean and malls, etc.)

 

--the novel compellingly treasures the woodsy place

 

--but it also perhaps sentimentalizes its sequence of episodes.   Because we meet so many characters, we never linger on the pain/catastrophe of any particular character or relationship very long

 

--rather than lingering and confronting “pain” (whatever that might mean in any aesthetic form), it indulges the nostalgic voice of Ivy (especially at the end).  We have a feeling of “sadness”, but it is a sentimental sadness

 

--contrast this with your reading (I hope!) of Faulkner.  He pulls off the trick of making Caddy absolutely three-dimensional in the progress of The Sound and Fury, and yet she is absolutely absent also.  What I am talking about will make sense when you read it the second time and start to feel the anguish of Benjy's memory traces of his lost, forever-gone sister.  The Sound and Fury is about loss.  It is a beautifully (not sentimentally) melancholic novel.

 

--true tragedy makes pain real; we linger in the space of trauma

 

--sentimentality exploits trauma only long enough so we can experience a tearful moment.  It is voyeuristic and pernicious as an art form (which is not to say we shouldn't enjoy it!).