Breaking the ice: Representations of white women in civil rights movement novels, 1954-1994

This study explores the process by which the white woman became centrally controversive in the civil rights debate and how, through the evolving perspective of authors of Civil Rights Movement fiction, she is transformed from passive antagonist to active, complex protagonist.; Chapter One traces the emergence of the cult of Southern womanhood in the ante-bellum South and discusses the influence of the cult on the roles of white women in Southern culture and literature. Chapters Two through Six examine the repercussions of the cult on the characterizations of white women in novels that draw substantially and significantly on the Civil Rights Movement for material written in four successive decades, beginning in the 1950s with the Brown v Board of Education decision. These chapters analyze the representations of white women in five novels published in each decade.; Chapter Two looks at novels published between 1954 and 1959. These novels (Caleb, My Son (1956) by Lucy Daniels, Deadline (1957) by Paul Darcy Boles, The Southerner (1957) by Douglas Kiker, and The Intruder (1959) by Charles Beaumont), preoccupied with the Brown decision, are written from a predominantly white male perspective and typically cast white women as a kind of “anti-lady”: unkind, unintelligent, and libidinous. Chapter Three examines five novels published in the 1960s: Look Away, Look Away (1964) by Ben Haas, The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones (1965) by Jesse Hill Ford, Five Smooth Stones (1966) by Anne Fairbairn, ‘Sippi (1967) by John Oliver Killens, and The Klansman (1967) by William Bradford Huie. These novels undermine the race-sex taboo at the core of racial prejudice. Non-Southern white women appear intelligent and tolerant, but Southern white women, as in the 1950s, contradict the aristocratic Southern ideal.; Chapters Four and Five consider novels from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Civil Rights Movement novels from these two decades are characterized by strong female characters, white women who equate the circumstances of their own lives with the situation of blacks living in the segregated South. The novels Once to Every Man (1970) by Paul Good, A Cry of Absence (1971) by Madison Jones, Long George Alley by Richard Hall (1972), Heartbreak Hotel (1976) by Anne Rivers Siddons, and Meridian (1976) by Alice Walker in the 1970s; County Woman (1982) by Joan Williams, Almost Family (1983) by Roy Hoffman, Go, Go, Said the Bird (1984) by Anne Nall Stallworth, Civil Wars (1984) by Rosellen Brown, and Betsey Brown (1985) by Ntozake Shange in the 1980s are as much concerned with the liberation of women from the cult of Southern womanhood as with stories of civil rights breakthroughs.; Chapter Six examines five novels written between 1990 and 1994: Thulani Davis's 1959 (1991), Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992), William Cobb's A Walk Through Fire (1992), Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle (1993), and Julius Lester's And All Our Wounds Forgiven (1994). With the exception of 1959, each of these novels has a white female protagonist who rejects her role as the South's palladium and who is cleared of the civil rights injustices committed in her name. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...