Ordering the facade: Photography and the politics of representation in contemporary southern women's fiction

This dissertation conjoins four main fields of inquiry: southern women's literature, photography and visual culture, southern cultural studies, and feminist criticism. Specifically, I examine how southern women writers use photographic tropes and fictional photographs to figure and critique the ways vision and visual representations define identity in the South. "Lady," "mammy," "jezebel," "trash"---images of southern women embody the tangled traditions of sexual division, racial difference, and marked class distinctions that undergird dominant notions of southernness. Typically, analyses of photography and literature read fictional photographs as figures of exploitation, or of tensions between "the real" and illusive, confounding images. I argue that in its critique of visual exploitation, recent southern women's fiction privileges ethical over epistemological concerns, and moves not to reject photography, but strategically to reconfigure its power in metaphors of resistance, trust and acknowledgment This strategy is especially effective in light of the visual legacy of the South, for it replaces notions of essence, visual or otherwise, with a recognition that ordering "facades" is the crucial work of claiming representational power. My focus on regional specificity brings broader theories of visual representation into sharper relief, and provides a model for further feminist analyses of visual culture and American literature.;The prologue outlines a brief history of actual photography in the South, as context for understanding the specifically regional visual economy that informs the work of southern writers. Chapter One uses William Faulkner's and Toni Morrison's photographic configurations of formal ethics to help theorize the historical tensions between visual, oral, and literary representation in southern culture and literature. Drawing evidence from southern historiography and examples from Walker Percy's fiction, Chapter Two reads the fictional photographs in Josephine Humphreys's Dreams of Sleep in context both of feminist theories of the gaze, and of a specifically southern literary tradition of southern ladies and staring, white male characters. Photography's role in racist anthropology and Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological counter-practice ground an analysis of Alice Walker's re-visioned South in Chapter Three. Chapter Four charts Dorothy Allison's use of actual and fictional photographs to strategically reconfigure historical and literary visualizations of southern, female "white trash."...