“You Nothing But Trash”:

White Trash Shame in

Dorothy Allison’s
Bastard Out of Carolina
by J. Brooks Bouson

“Americans love to hate the poor” and, in particular, to hate poor white
trash, observe Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz in their analysis of the
white trash phenomenon in America (1). A “classist slur” and a “racial
epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race
unto themselves,” white trash is “the most visible and clearly marked
form of whiteness” (2, 4). The fact that the term “trash” means “social
waste and detritus” (4) points to the social degradation and shame im-
plicit in this derogatory class designation. Referring to whites who live in
poverty—classically in rural poverty—the term also invokes long-stand-
ing stereotypes of poor whites as “incestuous and sexually promiscuous,
violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid” (2). That there is a “relationship be-
tween social formations and structures of feeling” (Fox 14) and that the
feeling of shame and the experience of being socially shamed are crucial
to the development of a white trash identity are revealed in Dorothy Al-
lison’s many public remarks on her white trash upbringing in Greenville,
South Carolina, and in her semi-autobiographical novel, Bastard Out
of Carolina. If American culture is often described as competitive and
success-oriented, it is also a shame-phobic society in which those who
are stigmatized as different or those who fail to meet social standards of
success are made to feel inferior, deficient, or both. Living in a “shame-
based” society in which there is “shame about shame and so it remains
under strict taboo” (Kaufman, Shame 32), Allison takes decided risks in
describing her shameful white trash origins and her experiences of phys-
ical and sexual abuse, including the risk of being re-shamed in a mass-

101
 102 Southern Literary Journal

media, talk-show culture that often ruthlessly exposes and shamelessly

sensationalizes the stories of victim-survivors.
Allison, who remarks that “shame was the constant theme” of her
childhood (“Skin” 229), describes her upbringing as a prolonged immer-
sion in shame. “What may be the central fact of my life,” writes Allison,
“is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard
daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family. . . . That fact,
the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this
society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had
dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to
overcome or deny it” (“Question” 15). “Born trash in a land where the
people all believe themselves natural aristocrats,” Allison’s family, the
Gibsons, had “a history of death and murder, grief and denial, rage and
ugliness” (Two 32). The Gibson women —“bearers of babies, burdens,
and contempt” (Two 32–33)—were marked as racially and sexually infe-
rior. “We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stu-
pid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull hair and tired eyes, thumb-
ing through magazines full of women so different from us they could
have been another species” (Two 33). Although Allison was proud of the
stubborn determination of the “hard and ugly” Gibson women, she was
also “horrified” by them and “did not want to grow up to be them” (Two
37, 38). What Allison found absent or caricatured in romantic depictions
of poverty and the noble and heroic poor was the “reality of self-hatred
and violence” among poor whites. “ The poverty I knew was dreary,
deadening, shameful. . . .” Her people, the Gibsons, were the “bad” poor
people: “men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably
pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from
working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children
with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. . . . We were not
noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. My
family was ashamed of being poor, of feeling hopeless. What was there
to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had
generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that
those who did try to escape failed” (“Question” 17–18).
Conscious of the shaping power of familial and cultural shame in
both her emotional life and in the construction of her white trash iden-
tity, Allison implicitly acknowledges white middle-class anxiety about
white underclass life as she, in her desire to cast suspicion on the popu-
lar romanticizing of poverty, ends up legitimating, at least in part, the
popular view that white trash culture is a central site of social pathology.
 White Trash Shame in Allison 103

“I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual vi-
olence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys,” Allison
insists (“Question” 36). Describing the pain and shame of her upbring-
ing, Allison recounts how her stepfather, who physically and sexually
abused Allison while she was growing up, instilled in her a deep and abid-
ing sense of self-contempt. To be told daily that “you’re a dog for break-
fast, lunch, and dinner” and to be knocked down “with that contempt
until you believe you’re contemptible—that’s the greatest damage. That’s
what has lain on my life like a layer of dirt I cannot wash off,” Allison re-
marks (Strong 8). “ The man raped me. It’s the truth. It’s a fact,” she
states. “He beat us, my stepfather, that short, mean-eyed truck driver
with his tight-muscled shoulders and uneasy smile” (Two 39, 45). Ac-
knowledging the debilitating impact of the abuse she suffered at the
hands of her stepfather, Allison recalls not only her reactive rage but also
her deep sense of herself as an unlovable and mutant creature: “Skin fear,
pulling back, flinching before the blow lands. Anticipating the burn of shame and the
shiver of despair. Conditioned to contempt and reflexive rage, I am pinned beneath a
lattice, iron-hard and locked down. Believing myself inhuman, mutant, too calloused
to ever love deeply or well” (“Skin” 230).
As Allison calls attention to the relationship between the social for-
mation of white trash identity and shame in her autobiographical reflec-
tions, she reveals that shame, as Gershen Kaufman has observed, is a
“multidimensional, multilayered” experience. “First of all an individual
phenomenon experienced in some form and to some degree by every
person,” it is also “a family phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon,” for
shame “is reproduced within families, and each culture has its own dis-
tinct sources as well as targets of shame” (Shame 191). That shame derives
from the shame sufferer’s “vicarious experience of the other’s scorn”
(Helen Lewis, “Introduction” 15) and that learned familial and cultural
shame can lead to destructive forms of self-hatred and self-contempt be-
come evident in Allison’s treatment of white trash shame in Bastard Out
of Carolina as she tells the story of her child narrator, Ruth Anne
Boatwright, who is nicknamed Bone and who grows up in Greenville,
South Carolina, in the 1950s and early 1960s. In describing Bone’s debili-
tating shame, Allison reveals that the core experience of shame, as Léon
Wurmser explains, is the “conviction of one’s unlovability” because of an
inherent sense that the self is “weak, dirty, and defective” (Mask 92, 93).
In the classic shame scenario, in which the “eye is the organ of shame par
excellence,” the individual feels exposed and humiliated—looked at with
contempt for being inferior, flawed, or dirty—and thus wants to hide or
 104 Southern Literary Journal

disappear (Wurmser, “Shame” 67). Fear of visual exposure, as Wurmser

explains, leads to the wish to “disappear as the person” one has shown
oneself to be, or “to be [seen as] different” than one is (Mask 232).1 Fo-
cusing attention on Bone’s “shame vulnerability”—that is, her “sensitiv-
ity to, and readiness for, shame” (Morrison 14) — Allison describes the
social disgrace of Bone’s “bastard” status and shows how Bone comes to
feel deep self-contempt as she suffers both physical and sexual abuse at
the hands of her stepfather, Daddy Glen. If at times Bone defends her-
self against painful feelings of helplessness and exposure through her
defiant shamelessness, her expressions of rage, and her enactment of an
attack-other script in which she actively humiliates her humiliators, she
also becomes so full of self-contempt and self-loathing that she wants to
disappear, that is, to die. Mired in shame, Bastard Out of Carolina deals
with the effects of shame, contempt, and shame-rage as it describes the
painful process by which Bone comes to see herself as a dumb and ugly
white trash girl “born to shame and death” (206).
That Bone’s life will be marred by violence and marked by shame is
suggested in the drama of her birth. Bone is born after an automobile ac-
cident caused when her drunken Uncle Travis plows his jacked up Chevy
headlong into another car. Because the pregnant fifteen-year-old Anney,
who is sleeping on the back seat of the Chevy, flies through the wind-
shield and hits the ground, rendering her unconscious for three days, she
is unable to bluff her way with the hospital staff and insist that she is
married. Thus, Bone is declared a certified bastard by the state of South
Carolina and the shaming word  is stamped on her birth
certificate in large, red-inked block letters. In describing the social stigma
once attached to unwed mothers and their children, Bastard Out of Car-
olina calls attention to the devastating effects of stigmatization. A social
phenomenon, stigmatization, as Rosemarie Thomson explains, is “an in-
teractive social process in which particular human traits are deemed not
only different, but deviant.” Reflecting the “tastes and opinions of the
dominant group,” stigmatization “reinforces that group’s idealized self-
description as neutral, normal, legitimate, and identifiable by denigrating
the characteristics of less powerful groups or those considered alien” (31;
see also Coleman). Thomson’s observation that “human stigmata func-
tion as social dirt” (33) points to the shame issues that underlie the
process of stigmatization. Remarking that while the effects of stigmati-
zation have long been known there has not been much discussion of the
relationship between stigma and shame, shame theorist Michael Lewis
describes the shame of the stigmatized individual who is publicly marked
 White Trash Shame in Allison 105

for his or her failure to meet social standards. Viewed by others as being
“deviant, flawed, limited . . . or generally undesirable,” the stigmatized in-
dividual suffers from a “spoiled identity”: a feeling that the whole self is
spoiled or no good (194, 207). Moreover, stigma, like shame, is “conta-
gious” and thus can affect not only the stigmatized individual but also
those associated with him or her (200). As a member of the disgraced
and discredited Boatwright family and the mother of an illegitimate
child, Anney is marked as a socially undesirable and tainted woman—as
someone suffering from a spoiled identity—and through the process of
stigma contagion, her social stigma ends up affecting and infecting her
daughter, Bone.
Focusing attention on the shaping and shaming power of hegemonic
discursive constructions of lower-class whites as the inferior, degenerate,
and socially stigmatized Other, Bastard Out of Carolina describes Anney’s
response to the discrediting label “white trash.” “Mama hated to be
called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over
other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and
looked at her like she was a rock on the ground. The stamp on that birth
certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they’d tried to put on her.
No-good, lazy, shiftless” (3). That such categorical devaluations serve to ob-
jectify targeted individuals who are viewed as “nothing but” members of a
discredited group and thus as “virtually indistinguishable from, and in
many respects substitutable for, one another” (Schur 30 –31) and that
stigmatized individuals, in being treated as if they were “invisible, non-
existent, or dead,” suffer a kind of “social death” (Coleman 226–227) is
evident in Anney’s feeling that to others she is little more than “a rock on
the ground”: that is, a socially despised nonperson. In describing the so-
cial death Anney suffers as a member of a disvalued group, Bastard Out
of Carolina also inscribes a shame drama. The fact that shame results
from the experience of being objectified by others so that “one’s status
as a subject [is] ignored, disregarded, denied, or negated” (Broucek 8) is
conveyed in this passage, and the rock image also captures the annihilat-
ing force of the other’s contempt, which can make the shamed individ-
ual feel as if he or she is “ ‘a nothing,’ ‘empty,’ ‘frozen’—‘like a stone’ ”
( Wurmser, Mask 83). Recalling accounts of how stigmatized people
often try to cover over or deny their stigma and thus “pass” as normal
(e.g. Gibbons 130–131; Coleman 222), Bastard describes how Anney tries
to overcome her shameful white-trash identity as a lazy shiftless person:
“She’d work her hands to claws, her back to a shovel shape, her mouth to
a bent and awkward smile — anything to deny what Greenville County
 106 Southern Literary Journal

wanted to name her” (3 –4). Rather than remedying her situation,

Anney’s attempt to deny her nonperson status through hard work further
dehumanizes her, turning her into “nothing but” a menial and socially in-
visible laborer.
Anney also is thwarted when she attempts to undo her shame and
pass as socially respectable in what, ironically enough, becomes a sham-
ing ritual: Anney’s annual visits to the Greenville courthouse where she
asks for but fails to obtain a new birth certificate without the stigmatiz-
ing word  stamped on it. In passages that recall Léon
Wurmser’s description of the feeling of exposure that accompanies
shame — the shamed individual’s sense that other people are staring at
her and are “full of taunts and mockery” because they are aware of her
“profound disgrace” (Mask 53)—Bastard Out of Carolina tells of Anney’s
repeated humiliations at the public re-exposure of her shame and social
stigma before a representative of the official white culture, the court-
house clerk, whose eyes laugh as he furnishes Anney with a duplicate of
Bone’s original birth certificate. Over time, as people continually tease
Anney about the birth certificate, she learns to laugh with them before
they laugh at her. When the courthouse burns down—which can be read
as a textual enactment not only of Anney’s burning shame-rage over the
social humiliation she has endured but also of her desire for revenge—
she destroys Bone’s birth certificate. “I’m glad the goddam courthouse
burned down,” she says (16), while the Boatwrights defiantly laugh all
over Greenville at the news of the courthouse fire, taking pleasure, like
Anney, in the destruction of this hated symbol of the official — and
shaming—white culture.
In illustrating the public humiliation that accompanies Anney’s private
shame at having an illegitimate daughter, Allison shows how Anney in-
evitably transfers to Bone her own personal — and familial — sense of
shame. Shame theorist Michael Lewis’s observation that children raised
in a shame-filled environment by shame-prone parents “are likely to
learn to experience shame through empathic shame induction” (113) is il-
lustrated in Bone’s story. “I got no shame . . . and I don’t need no man to
tell me jackshit about my child,” Anney angrily insists when the preacher
tells her that her shame is between her and her God and that there is “no
need to let it mark the child” (14). Despite Anney’s defiance—her angry
retort to the preacher signaling her attempt to cover over her deep-
rooted shame—her shame does, in fact, “mark” Bone. The shaping and
shaming power of internalized corrosive constructions of white trash
identity as stigmatized — as uncultured, uncivilized, and unclean — be-
 White Trash Shame in Allison 107

comes evident in the family stories Bone learns about her own origins.
Not only is Bone the embodiment of her mother’s shame by being des-
ignated as a certified bastard by the official culture — a label that marks
her as someone with a stigmatized or spoiled identity — but the family
story about Bone’s father also represents her as an unclean white trash
child. Bone is told that her father was a “sorry excuse for a man” and that
when she was an infant, she urinated all over him so that her “baby’s
piss” stunk up his clothes “for all to smell” (25, 26). In this family story,
Bone is constructed as a smelly, dirty, and angry infant who acts out the
shaming invective “piss on you”2 on her abandoning, no-count father.
And Bone is marked as different because she, unlike the fair-haired
Boatwrights, has the blue-black hair and black eyes of her great-great-
grandfather, a Cherokee Indian according to one version of family his-
tory—Bone’s mixed racial heritage functioning as a sign of her racial im-
purity as a member of the “dysgenic” white trash. Pointing to the power
of culturally sedimented imagery, Bone comes to associate her putative
Cherokee heritage not only with the “black-headed” and “man-type”
part of herself, but also with her “nasty,” “rock-hard,” and quick-
tempered white trash identity (54–55): that is, with her reactive shame-
rage, the angry part of herself that fends off others who might expose
her shame and thus hurt her.
As Bone comes to identify with her poor white relatives, the Boat-
wrights, she internalizes their white trash shame. That the stubborn
“pride” and the defiant shamelessness of poor whites like the Boat-
wrights function to cover their social shame — their feelings of social
powerlessness and inferiority—is evident in the narrative’s description of
Bone’s family. Granny’s shaming words to one of her grandsons — she
teasingly calls him “ugly”— points to the internalization of classist
stereotypes in the construction of white trash identity, and, indeed, Bone
later comes to see herself as an ugly Boatwright child. “Granny was ugly
herself,” Bone remarks, “she said so often enough, though she didn’t
seem to care” (21). Fitting the derogatory stereotypes of white trash cul-
ture, Bone’s uncles—Earle, Beau, and Nevil—are “dangerous” men that
“half the county went in terror of ” while her aunts—Ruth, Raylene, and
Alma — seem “old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and
clean up after the men” (22, 23). When the men shoot out each other’s
windows or race their pickups on the railroad tracks or punch out a local
bartender, Bone’s aunts shrug it off: “What men did was just what men
did.” At times, Bone identifies with her uncles’ “rambunctious” behavior
and wishes she had been “born a boy” (23). But she also identifies with
 108 Southern Literary Journal

the oppositional defiance — the so-called stubbornness — of the Boat-

wright women. Like them, she is “stubborn,” and when she is with her
aunts, she feels as if she is “part of something nasty and strong and sep-
arate” from the world of “spitting, growling, overbearing males” (30, 91).
Through their oppositional behavior —the dangerous, antisocial be-
havior of the Boatwright men and the stubborn and sometimes nasty be-
havior of the women — the Boatwrights enact a socially scripted and
stereotypical role: that of the shamelessly defiant and angry white trash
poor. To flaunt one’s white trash shame is not to be without shame, for
as Léon Wurmser has observed, “if it is shame that is fought against by
shamelessness, it is shame that returns in spectral form” in shameless
behavior (Mask 262). A reaction formation against shame, shamelessness
serves as a classic defense against the feelings of powerlessness and
vulnerability that accompany shame. A deeply humiliated people, the
Boatwrights try to hide their weakness and woundedness through their
defiant and stubborn displays of white trash shamelessness. Rather than
being free of shame, they are caught in a shame-rage feeling trap: a self-
perpetuating chain of emotions in which unacknowledged shame leads
to anger, which, in turn, leads to more shame.3 That such shame-rage spi-
rals can endure through a lifetime and be transmitted intergenerationally
is dramatized in Allison’s novel.
When Bone’s mother, Anney, who was briefly married and widowed
and who works at a diner, is pursued by Glen Waddell, she transforms
from a harried woman into a giggly and hopeful girl. “He’s a good man,”
Anney says of Glen (33), who is, at first, kind to Anney and gentle with
her daughters, Bone and Reese. Using a series of class-coded descrip-
tions, the novel presents Glen as an amalgam of middle-class refinement
and lower-class brute physicality. He is “a small man but so muscular and
strong that it was hard to see the delicacy in him, though he was strangely
graceful in his rough work clothes and heavy boots. . . . Glen Waddell’s
feet were so fine that his boots had to be bought in the boys’ department
of the Sears, Roebuck, while his gloves could only be found in the tall
men’s specialty stores” (34). A man who “didn’t drink, didn’t mess
around, didn’t even talk dirty” (35), Glen seemingly offers Anney an es-
cape from her disgraceful white trash family origins and an opportunity
to pass as middle class and socially respectable. But, in fact, Glen is at-
tracted to Anney because she is a Boatwright. The black sheep of the
middle-class Waddell family, Glen initially determines to marry Anney
because he wants to marry the “whole Boatwright legend” and thus
“shame his daddy and shock his brothers” (13).
 White Trash Shame in Allison 109

A failed member of the middle class and the Waddell family scape-
goat, Glen acts out a defending script against his habitual shame by iden-
tifying with the shameless and antisocial behavior of the dangerous
Boatwright men. But if Glen gains a temporary sense of power through
his identification with the Boatwrights, he also acts out his family’s ex-
pectations, for in defiantly marrying into the Boatwright family he, yet
again, fails his family and disgraces himself. In a repetition of a father-
son childhood drama, Glen’s father, the proud and successful owner of a
local dairy, openly humiliates the adult Glen about his failed life. Shamed
by his father, the swaggering Glen, who becomes unsure of himself and
visibly slumps when he is around his father, lives in a chronic state of
shame-rage. In Anney’s assessment of Glen’s behavior, Glen “got bent”
because of what his father did to him. “I an’t never seen a boy wanted his
daddy’s love so much and had so little of it. All Glen really needs is to
know himself loved, to get out from under his daddy’s meanness” (132).
Driven by the kind of love that “eats a man up,” Glen is someone who
“could turn like whiskey in a bad barrel” (41, 45). In his needy, desperate
love for Anney and his violent response to humiliation, Glen behaves like
the violence-prone men described by psychologists. Like Glen, such men
“show both an excessive need for supportive relationships to hold them-
selves together and an exquisite sensitivity to humiliation,” and they
often mask their vulnerability to personality disorganization by present-
ing themselves as “powerful and intimidating” (Lansky 154, 149).
Hypersensitive to slights, the shame-vulnerable Glen verbally and
physically assaults people who insult him and thus loses job after job.
“ The berserker rage that would come on him was just a shade off the
power of the Boatwrights’ famous binges. . . . Tire irons and pastry racks,
pitchforks and mop handles, things got bent or broken around Daddy
Glen. His face would pink up and his hands would shake; his neck would
start to work, the muscles ridging up and throbbing; then his mouth
would swell and he would spit. Words came out that were not meant to
be understood: ‘Goddam motherfucker son of a bitch shitass!’ Magic words that
made other men back off, put their hands up, palms out, and whisper
back, ‘Now, Glen, now, now, Glen, now, hold on, boy’ ” (100). In Bone’s
separate but connected images of Daddy Glen, the novel conveys the dy-
namic relationship between Glen’s “berserker rage” and his shame. As
Bone envisions Glen screaming at her, “his neck bright red with rage,”
she sees “the other, impossible vision just by it, Daddy Glen at his
daddy’s house with his head hanging down and his mouth so soft spit
shone on the lower lip” (100). His fragile masculine pride undermined
 110 Southern Literary Journal

because he finds it difficult to support his family, Daddy Glen uses a clas-
sic defending script against shame when he blames others for his failures.
For as shame theorist Gershen Kaufman has remarked, “The transfer of
blame is fundamentally a transfer of shame” (Psychology 102). Seeking to
relocate his own shame in others, Daddy Glen blames his failure on the
“unbelief ” of his family: “Our unbelief was what made him fail. Our
lack of faith made him the man he was” (81).
“ You’re mine now, an’t just Boatwrights,” Daddy Glen says of Bone
and Reese, intent, initially, on adopting them (52). An autocratic, con-
trolling man, Glen demands Bone’s complete submission to his will, and
over time he begins to use corporeal punishment to enforce obedience to
his rules. In an image that obsessively repeats and circulates in the narra-
tive, Bastard Out of Carolina focuses on Glen’s enormous and punishing
hands, which hang “like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-
muscled arms” (35). “He’s quiet, but you make Glen mad and he’ll knock
you down,” Uncle Earle says of him. “Boy uses those hands of his like
pickaxes” (61). Bone is beaten for the first time when she, unaware that
Daddy Glen is home, runs through the house and thus breaks one of his
rules. “You bitch. You little bitch. . . . I’ve waited a long time to do this,
too long,” he says to Bone. “I heard the sound of the belt swinging up, a
song in the air, a high-pitched terrible sound. It hit me and I screamed.
Daddy Glen swung his belt again. I screamed at its passage through the
air, screamed before it hit me. I screamed for Mama” (106). Although
Anney intervenes, she also, in effect, revictimizes her daughter by excus-
ing Glen’s brutality. Just as Glen shifts the blame for his abusive behavior
onto Bone — insisting that he beat her because her misbehavior made
him go “crazy”— so Anney asks her daughter what she did to provoke
the beating. “What had I done? I had run in the house. What was she ask-
ing? I wanted her to go on talking and understand without me saying any-
thing. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and
take us away from him, to kill him if need be” (107).
The designated “bad” white trash child who needs correction, sup-
posedly for her own good, Bone comes to find it difficult to keep Daddy
Glen, who calls Bone’s family “that trash,” from exploding into rage.
After Bone is beaten, Anney, even as she comforts Bone, also tells her
daughter not to be “so stubborn” (110)—“stubborn” behavior being the
defining trait of the Boatwright women. “ You are hard as bone,” Glen
tells Bone, “the stubbornest child on the planet! . . . Cold as death, mean
as a snake, and twice as twisty” (111). In his punishment of Bone, Glen
tries to break her will through physical pain and psychological terror, and
 White Trash Shame in Allison 111

he also acts out a complicated self-drama. As a stubborn child, Bone rep-

resents Glen’s own stubborn defiance as the black sheep of the Waddell
family. By identifying with the aggressor and acting out a power script
when he beats her,4 Glen not only expresses contempt for and tem-
porarily fends off awareness of his own chronic shame, which he finds
embodied in Bone, he also induces in her his own split-off feelings of
helplessness and shame as the “bad” member of the Waddell family.
“ The shamer is a person who may act inadvertently, but usually acts
aggressively, to put down another,” writes Joseph Berke. “He is like a par-
ent who disciplines a child maliciously. The issue becomes . . . the sys-
tematic demoralization of one human being by another who gains con-
siderable sadistic pleasure by so doing” (326). As Daddy Glen avenges
himself on Bone for his own earlier feelings of shaming rejection and
humiliation, he reinforces her inherent sense of white trash shame.
“Sometimes when I looked up into his red features and blazing eyes, I
knew that it was nothing I had done that made him beat me. It was just
me, the fact of my life, who I was in his eyes and mine. I was evil. Of
course I was. I admitted it to myself, locked my fingers into fists, and shut
my eyes to everything I did not understand” (110). Full of self-blame,
Bone capitulates to her stepfather’s psychological control and also his
sexual abuse of her. “He was always finding something I’d done, some-
thing I had to be told, something he just had to do because he loved me.
And he did love me. He told me so over and over again, holding my body
tight to his, his hands shaking as they moved restlessly, endlessly, over my
belly, ass, and thighs” (108). The only time Glen is gentle with Bone is
when he is molesting her. “I could not tell Mama. I would not have
known how to explain why I stood there and let him touch me. It wasn’t
sex . . . but then, it was something like sex” (109).
Describing the impact of childhood abuse on character development,
trauma specialist Elizabeth Waites explains how the childhood victim can
develop a scapegoat identity or incorporate self-punitive behavior into
her personality structure (68). Evidence that Bone has developed a
scapegoat identity is found in her masturbatory fantasies in which she
imagines not only that people are watching Glen beat her while she re-
mains defiantly proud but also that the witnesses of this shaming act ad-
mire and love her. “I was ashamed of myself for the things I thought
about when I put my hands between my legs, more ashamed for mastur-
bating to the fantasy of being beaten than for being beaten in the first
place. I lived in a world of shame. I hid my bruises as if they were evi-
dence of crimes I had committed” (112 –113). If in this replay of her
 112 Southern Literary Journal

stepfather’s physical and sexual abuse, Bone attempts to gain active mas-
tery over passive suffering, she also defies her stepfather through her auto-
erotic pleasures and thus achieves a secret sense of “pride.” Even though
her masochistic fantasies are “terrible,” she still loves them. “In them, I
was very special. I was triumphant, important. I was not ashamed. There
was no heroism possible in the real beatings. There was just being beaten
until I was covered with snot and misery” (113).
As Bone’s traumatic abuse continues and she internalizes stereotypes
of white trash badness, she becomes, in part, an angry and vengeful girl
as she verbally expresses and acts out her shame-rage. When Bone steals
Tootsie Rolls from Woolworth’s — an act that associates her with the
thieving behavior of white trash people—Anney forces Bone to return
the stolen candy to the store manager and to pay for the candy she ate.
Enraged, Bone wants to kill the store manager with her stare, and after-
ward she retains her feelings of “desperate hunger edged with hatred and
an aching lust to hurt somebody back” (98). Years later when Bone
breaks into and vandalizes the Woolworth’s store, she gets revenge for
the “humiliation” she suffered, a humiliation that has “itched” at her and
“always” been “in the back” of her mind (222). The description of
Bone’s deep-seated rage recalls trauma investigator Judith Herman’s dis-
cussion of the behavior of abused children. “Feelings of rage and mur-
derous revenge fantasies are normal responses to abusive treatment,” ex-
plains Herman (104). Like the abused children described by Herman,
Bone finds it difficult to modulate her anger, and thus she becomes fur-
ther convinced of her inner badness. And just as abused children some-
times try to camouflage their “malignant sense of inner badness” by at-
tempting to be good (Herman 105), so Bone sees herself as bad — as a
mean and nasty white trash girl—and yet a part of her aspires to be the
perfect little girl and to make Glen proud. When the shame-sensitive
Bone, who hungers for what she sees as the ideal life of the middle-class
Waddells, overhears the Waddells call her family trash, she feels exposed
as “dumb and ugly” (102), and she is aware of her burning shame-rage
and her desire for retribution. “Trash for sure. . . . I could feel a kind of
heat behind my eyes that lit up everything I glanced at. It was dangerous,
that heat. It wanted to pour out and burn everything up, everything they
had that we couldn’t have, everything that made them think they were
better than us” (103).
“I knew, I knew I was the most disgusting person on earth. I didn’t de-
serve to live another day,” Bone says when she attempts to cure herself
of her anger and hatefulness through religion and gospel music, music
 White Trash Shame in Allison 113

that makes her feels “ashamed and glorified” at once (135–136). When
Bone befriends Shannon Pearl, whose father books singers for the
gospel music circuit, she identifies with the “strange and ugly” (156)
Shannon, and feels, alternately, disgust and a fierce and protective love
for her. “I watched her face — impassive, self-sufficient, and stubborn;
she reminded me of myself, or at least the way I had come to think of
myself,” Bone remarks of Shannon (154). A “lurching hunched creature”
(155) and an object of public ridicule, Shannon, who has the white skin
and hair and the pale pink eyes of an albino, is taunted and bullied by
other children because she is physically different. Depicted as a freak or
physical monster, Shannon Pearl is an example of what Rosemarie
Thomson, in her analysis of the representation of physical disability in
American culture and literature, calls “corporeal otherness” (5). Remark-
ing on the fact that as recently as 1974 so-called ugly laws were used to re-
strict “visibly disabled people from public places,” Thomson explains
that “the meanings attributed to extraordinary bodies” are found in so-
cial relationships in which the group that possesses valued physical char-
acteristics “maintains its ascendancy and its self-identity by systematically
imposing the role of cultural or corporeal inferiority on others.” The fact
that the corporeally inferior figure “operates as the vividly embodied,
stigmatized other” (7) points to the underlying shame issues attached
to Allison’s representation of Shannon Pearl, who comes to function in
the text as a visible sign of Bone’s feelings of white trash ugliness and
shame-rage.
Contrary to Bone’s expectations that the ugly Shannon will be a model
Christian and act in a patient, wise, and generous way, Shannon, in fact,
is filled with hatred for those who shame her. Wanting to turn the tables
on those who have shamed her, Shannon becomes bound in a shame-
rage feeling trap, spending most of her time “brooding on punishments
either she or God would visit” on people who have hurt her (157). When
Bone sees the fire of hatred and outrage burning in Shannon’s pink eyes,
she tellingly wonders if she has the same hatred in her own eyes. Ob-
serving Shannon visibly wilt when a man pronounces her ugly, Bone re-
actively insults the man. Intoning the shaming discourse of dirt and
defilement used to describe her own illegitimate status and white trash
identity, Bone calls the man a “bastard” and an “ugly sack of shit” (165).
Subsequently aware of the terrible hatred in Shannon’s face, Bone, for a
moment, loves the disfigured girl with all her heart. “If there was a God,
then there would be justice. If there was justice, then Shannon and I
would make them all burn” (166). Yet despite Bone’s identificatory bond
 114 Southern Literary Journal

with Shannon, the two shame-sensitive girls inevitably turn on each

other. “ You. . . . you trash. You nothing but trash,” Shannon says to
Bone. “Your mama’s trash, and your grandma, and your whole dirty fam-
ily” (171). Retorting in kind, Bone calls Shannon a “white-assed bitch,” an
“ugly thing,” and a “monster” (170, 171). “You so ugly your own mama
don’t even love you,” Bone says to Shannon (172), Bone’s angry and in-
sulting words giving voice to her deep-rooted fear of her own ugliness
and unlovability—that is, her own shame.
In the spectacular demise of Shannon Pearl, who becomes engulfed
in flames at a family picnic when she lights a match after spraying too
much lighter fluid on the charcoal grill, Bastard Out of Carolina enacts a
complicated shame drama. “Shannon didn’t even scream,” Bone remarks.
“Her mouth was wide open, and she just breathed the flames in. Her
glasses went opaque, her eyes vanished, and all around her skull her fine
hair stood up in a crown of burning glory. Her dress whooshed and bil-
lowed into orange-yellow smoky flames. . . . I saw Shannon Pearl disap-
pear from this world” (201). The fiery death of Shannon depicts the self-
consuming nature of her chronic shame-rage. It also dramatizes the
social death experienced by the socially stigmatized individual and the
annihilating power of the other’s contempt as it enacts a classic desire of
the shamed individual, who is treated as an object of contempt, to hide
or disappear. As Léon Wurmser explains, “If it is appearance (exposure)
that is central in shame, disappearance is the logical outcome of shame.”
Indeed, “Shame’s aim is disappearance” (Mask 81, 84). In dramatizing a
contempt-disappear scenario, this scene illustrates the destructive force
of the shamer’s contempt — a “global type of aggression” and “strong
form of rejection” that “wants to eliminate the other being” (Mask
80–81). In Wurmser’s description, “Contempt says: ‘You should disap-
pear as such a being as you have shown yourself to be — failing, weak,
flawed, and dirty. Get out of my sight: Disappear!’ ” To be exposed as
one who fails someone else’s or one’s own expectations causes shame,
and to “disappear into nothing is the punishment for such failure”
(“Shame” 67).
“No, I whispered in the night. No, I will not die. No. I clamped my
teeth. No,” Bone tells herself as she remains haunted by Shannon’s fiery
death and convinced that she is a white trash girl “born to shame and
death” (205, 206). Helen Block Lewis, in describing the heightened self-
consciousness of the shamed individual, explains that the shame experi-
ence results from the individual’s vicarious experience of the other’s con-
tempt: her awareness of “self-in-the-eyes-of-the-other” (“Introduction”
 White Trash Shame in Allison 115

15). In a scene that captures this core shame experience, the novel de-
scribes Bone’s self-contempt when she gazes at her naked body and her
stern and empty face. Viewing herself as an object of contempt — as
“ugly, pasty, and numb”—Bone understands why Daddy Glen is hateful
toward her and why he has made a point of telling her that she doesn’t
have anything be proud of (208). “ ‘ You think you’re so special,’ he’d
jeered. . . . ‘ Your mama has spoiled you. She don’t know what a lazy,
stubborn girl you are, but I do’ ” (209). Seeing herself through Daddy
Glen’s contemptuous gaze, the demoralized Bone becomes so full of
self-contempt and self-loathing that she wants to die. Explaining the link
between shame and the wish to die, Carl Schneider observes how every-
day expressions—“I was so ashamed, I could have died”; “I could have
sunk into the ground and disappeared”; and “I was mortified”—capture
this connection (78). The deeply shamed Bone wants to be “already
dead, cold and gone.” To her, “Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me
and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole,
seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid” (209).
As Bone succumbs to Daddy Glen’s withering contempt, she tries to
resist his efforts to define her as a worthless, white trash Boatwright. At
the bottom of the endless hole of shame, “at the darkest point, my anger
would come and I would know that he had no idea who I was, that he
never saw me as the girl who worked hard for Aunt Raylene, who got
good grades no matter how often I changed schools, who ran errands for
Mama and took good care of Reese. I was not dirty, not stupid, and if I
was poor, whose fault was that?” Enraged with Daddy Glen, Bone imag-
ines herself slashing his throat in the middle of the night and dreams of
cutting out his evil heart. Yet another part of her still yearns for an ideal
storybook family. “If he loved me, if he only loved me. Why didn’t he
love me?” Bone wonders as she comes to recognize that she feels what
the shamefaced Glen feels when he stands around his father’s house with
his head hanging down (209).
“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with
lies. It was that way with Mama and Daddy Glen,” Bone remarks of the
sudden public exposure of the shameful family secret of Glen’s physical
abuse of her (248). When Aunt Raylene discovers bloody stripes on
Bone’s thighs and shows them to Bone’s uncles, they assault Daddy Glen.
“I’m not ashamed of beating that asshole,” Earle remarks afterwards
(255). Yet despite the family’s defense of Bone and her uncles’ enactment
of Bone’s own deep-seated rage and wish for revenge, she does not find
release from her chronic shame. Instead, when Anney leaves Glen and
 116 Southern Literary Journal

moves into a two-room apartment, Bone feels that everything — her

mother’s silence and her sister’s anger —is somehow her fault. Revealing
her identification with her role as the family scapegoat, she thinks that
she is blameworthy: that she is the one who did wrong and enraged
Daddy Glen. And when she subsequently realizes that what happened to
her was not her fault and that Daddy Glen has taken a sadistic sexual
pleasure in beating her, she feels even more shame. “Had he come? Had
he been beating me until he came in his trousers?” the mortified Bone
wonders. “ The thought made me gag. . . . It had all been the way he
wanted it. It had nothing to do with me or anything I had done. It was
an animal thing, just him using me. . . . I fell into shame like a suicide
throws herself into a river” (253).
For Allison, the ultimate focus of Bastard Out of Carolina is not only
Daddy Glen’s sadistic abuse of Bone but also the “complicated, painful
story of how my mama had, and had not, saved me as a girl” (“Question”
34). Hence, in telling the story of the abusive father, Allison also pays at-
tention to the collusive mother by describing how Anney repeatedly
leaves Glen for the sake of Bone only to return to him again and again.
When Bone finally gathers enough strength to defy Glen and to refuse to
go back to live with him or to tell Anney that she wants the family to be
reunited, she is brutally raped by an enraged Glen. Calling Bone a “little
cunt” and a “goddam little bastard,” Glen tells her that he has prayed that
she would die. “I’ll shut you up. I’ll teach you,” he says as he pins her
down and pulls down her pants (284). “ You’ll never mouth off to me
again. . . . You’ll do as you’re told. You’ll tell Anney what I want you to
tell her” (285). That the rapist uses sex to humiliate the victim and instill
in her a terrifying sense of helplessness as her autonomy is violated (see
Janoff-Bulman 78–81) is apparent in the rape scene. “He rocked in and
ground down, flexing and thrusting his hips. I felt like he was tearing me
apart, my ass slapping against the floor with every thrust, burning and
tearing and bruising. . . . He reared up, supporting his weight on my
shoulder while his hips drove his sex into me like a sword” (285). As
Daddy Glen exerts total control over Bone and intentionally harms her,
he acts out his annihilating contempt: his wish to degrade and dehuman-
ize her through his act of sexual domination.
Unlike an earlier version of the novel which depicted Anney as the
avenging and heroic mother by having Anney and Bone kill Glen (Strong
11; see also Sandell 222), the novel presents Anney as a complicit and be-
traying mother who ultimately chooses her victimizing husband over her
victimized child. Finding Glen still on top of Bone after he has raped
 White Trash Shame in Allison 117

her, Anney physically attacks Glen only to subsequently turn away from
her daughter in order to comfort the desperately needy Glen. “Could she
love me and still hold him like that?” Bone wonders. Devastated, Bone
wants “everything to stop, the world to end, anything, but not to lie
bleeding while she held him and cried. I looked up into white sky going
gray. The first stars would come out as the sky darkened. I wanted to see
that, the darkness and the stars. I heard a roar far off, a wave of night and
despair waiting for me, and followed it out into the darkness” (291). Be-
cause a “secure sense of connection with caring people is the foundation
of personality development,” as Judith Herman has observed, traumatic
events, in calling “into question basic human relationships,” can “shatter
the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to
others” (52, 51). In this wrenching scene, Bastard Out of Carolina conveys
the trauma victim’s feelings of alienation, disconnection, and inner dead-
ness. This scene also captures the shame sufferer’s feelings of unlovabil-
ity. “Debilitating shame,” as Carl Goldberg aptly remarks, “is an alienat-
ing feeling. It conveys an anxiety that all is not right with one’s life, that
one’s existence is not safe and harmonious. It carries the opprobrium
that the sufferer is unlovable and should be cast out of human company.
The shame-bound person has learned from others and now accuses him-
self of the ‘crime’ of being surplus, unwanted, and worthless” (8).
After Anney chooses Glen over her daughter, Bone is taken care of by
her Aunt Raylene, who acts as a mother substitute. When Anney visits
Bone for the last time before disappearing from her daughter’s life, Bone
feels that Anney is a stranger to her. But then when Anney tells Bone that
she loves her and embraces her sobbing daughter, Bone temporarily lets
go of her grief and anger and shame. As the novel ends, Bone, who is
about to turn thirteen, opens the envelope her mother has left her, which
contains Bone’s birth certificate with the bottom part left unmarked. At
best a misguided attempt to ease her daughter’s shame, Anney’s parting
gesture serves to remind readers of Allison’s novel just how deeply Bone
has been marked by her mother’s shame and by Glen, who has con-
temptuously beaten into Bone a sense of herself as a worthless and bad
individual: as a white trash Boatwright.
In its harrowing and unrelenting account of Bone’s abusive treatment
by Daddy Glen, Bastard Out of Carolina evokes the ubiquitous cultural
image of the white trash family as a site of violence and social pathology,
and it also provides a compelling testament to the destructive impact of
parentally transmitted intergenerational shame. But Allison also wants to
suggest the potential healing of Bone in the novel’s closure. “I’ve spent
 118 Southern Literary Journal

twenty years working with other survivors . . . [and] done a lot of study,”
Allison remarks. “ The most normal response is to blame yourself and
hide. And to not get angry. Anger is the healthy feeling.” According to
Allison, “The peak of the story is that Bone gets angry. And up to that
point, she is not yet thirteen. She has spent essentially six years with her
stepfather, never allowing herself to be angry and never holding anyone
responsible—always believing that it is something wrong with her.” As
Allison explains, Bone has “the possibility of healing” and of surviving
her experience “whole” because she “really does get angry and begins to
hold people responsible, and she has that family, that all along was giv-
ing her little pieces of how she can be strong, how she can survive the
worst things in the world, because they happen” (Ng 3).
Intent on showing the positive impact of the Boatwright family on
Bone, Allison interweaves graphic scenes of Bone’s abuse with episodes
of respite and safety in which Bone stays with members of her extended
family, such as her Aunt Ruth or her Aunt Raylene. Bone, who feels con-
sumed by shame, finds some relief in her relationship with Aunt Ruth,
who tells Bone stories about her family—a potentially healing act in Al-
lison’s novel. Similarly, Aunt Raylene, who was “kind of wild” when she
was young (179), also acts as a stabilizing force in Bone’s life. “ Trash
rises,” remarks Aunt Raylene, who makes money from the trash she scav-
enges from the river. “I like to watch things pass. . . . Time and men and
trash out on the river” (180). Countering Daddy Glen’s constant deni-
gration of Bone, Aunt Raylene tells Anney that Bone, rather than being
lazy, “works like a dog” and, rather than being inferior and bad, is “the
best” Anney has (188). And Aunt Raylene attempts to instill a sense of
pride in Bone by telling her to “get out there and do things. . . . Make
people nervous and make your old aunt glad” (182).
In a reparative gesture, the closure suggests that Bone’s connection to
her extended family makes her feel connected to her estranged mother:
“[Mama’s] life had folded into mine. What would I be like when I was
fifteen, twenty, thirty? Would I be as strong as she had been, as hungry
for love, as desperate, determined, and ashamed?” As Bone leans her
head against Aunt Raylene, “trusting her arm and her love,” she recog-
nizes, “I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a
Boatwright woman” (309). Yet while Allison shows Bone gaining a po-
tentially healing sense of family pride and belonging as she identifies her-
self as a “Boatwright woman,” the stubborn “pride” of Bone’s family, as
the novel shows, functions to cover their chronic social shame: their
abiding feelings of social powerlessness and inferiority. Because the
 White Trash Shame in Allison 119

Boatwrights are socially stigmatized as white trash, the reparative gesture

in the closure’s description of Bone’s healing identification with her
white trash family roots remains problematic. And, indeed, Allison has
described how in her own life she “tried desperately” for many years to
run from her family, distancing herself from her sisters as she attempted
to refuse the class she was “born to” (Pratt 32). Growing up ashamed of
her origins, Allison was driven to act out a classic defense against shame
as she learned the “habit of hiding” (“Question” 13–14). After spending
many years of her life trying to protect herself and hide her “despised
identity,” Allison ultimately came to see that those “born poor and dif-
ferent” are driven to give themselves away or lose themselves or disap-
pear as the people they “really are” (“Question” 29, 34).
“For me,” Allison remarks, “the bottom line has simply become the
need to resist that omnipresent fear, that urge to hide and disappear, to
disguise my life, my desires, and the truth about how little any of us un-
derstand — even as we try to make the world a more just and human
place. Most of all, I have tried to understand the politics of they, why
human beings fear and stigmatize the different while secretly dreading
that they might be one of the different themselves” (“Question” 35). If
Allison spent many years of her life trying to hide her despised identity,
in Bastard Out of Carolina she knowingly risks being shamed again as she
describes her family origins and breaks the culturally imposed silence
about incest.5 “That our true stories may be violent, distasteful, painful,
stunning, and haunting, I do not doubt,” Allison writes. “But our true
stories will be literature. No one will be able to forget them, and though
it will not always make us happy to read of the dark and dangerous places
in our lives, the impact of our reality is the best we can ask of our litera-
ture” (“Believing” 166).
To Allison, literature is not only an important site for the production
of the dark and dangerous places of white trash culture, but it also is a
place where she can tell and preserve stories about her people, the Gib-
sons, as she continues to come to terms with her origins as someone
“born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, con-
temptible, and somehow deserved” (“Question” 15). “Peasants, that’s
what we are and always have been. Call us the lower orders, the great un-
washed, the working class, the poor, proletariat, trash, lowlife and scum.
I can make a story out of it, out of us,” writes Allison as she describes
her white trash origins (Two 1). An author who has tried to understand
why poor whites are feared and stigmatized, Allison is acutely aware of
the relationship between the experience of being socially shamed and the
 120 Southern Literary Journal

development of white trash identity. Gaining a kind of public pride as

the author of a widely acclaimed novel about white trash culture, Allison
exposes the painful and shameful facts of her life as she describes, with
amazing force in Bastard Out of Carolina and in her autobiographical writ-
ings, just what it feels like to be designated as the socially inferior, stig-
matized Other and treated as an object of contempt—as trash, nothing
but trash.

notes
1. It is suggestive that shame, which induces secrecy and a hiding response, is
an “only recently rediscovered feeling state” (Miller xi). Since 1971, “there has
been a rapid increase in the literature on the psychology of shame, thus redress-
ing a long-standing neglect of the subject,” writes shame theorist Helen Block
Lewis (“Preface” xi). This neglect of shame, in part, can be attributed to “a
prevailing sexist attitude in science, which pays less attention to nurturance than
to aggression” and thus “depreciates the shame that inheres in ‘loss of love’ ”
(Helen Lewis, “Preface” xi). Because of the Freudian view that attachment is
regressive and that women are shame-prone as a result of their need to conceal
their genital deficiency, there is an “implied hierarchy” in classical psychoanalytic
discourse, which views shame as preoedipal and guilt as oedipal (Helen Lewis,
“Role of Shame” 31). To Freudians, guilt was the “more worthy affective ex-
perience” compared to shame, which was viewed as “the developmentally more
primitive affect” (Morrison 5). Shame, then, until recently has had a “stigma”
attached to it so that “there has been a shame about studying shame in the
psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic fields” (Goldberg x). But with the move-
ment away from the classical Freudian oedipal conflict-guilt model of personality
and the intensifying focus on the narcissistically wounded and shame-ridden
self—beginning in the 1970s and with increased interest in the 1980s and 1990s—
shame has become the subject of psychoanalytic scrutiny, most notably in the
work of affect and shame theorists like Silvan Tomkins, Helen Block Lewis,
Donald Nathanson, Andrew Morrison, Gershen Kaufman, and Léon Wurmser.
2. Donald Nathanson, in his discussion of the relationship between excretory
epithets and shame, remarks that classic shame expressions—such as “piss on
you,” “pisser,” “shit,” “you little shit”—capture the moment of embarrassment
when the shamed individual feels “infantile, weak, and dirty, unable to control . . .
bodily functions.” While shame is “much more than just excretion,” according to
Nathanson, “excretory epithets are about shame” (“Shame/Pride Axis” 198).
3. Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger, who argue that “unacknowledged
pride and shame are ubiquitous in all human encounters” (13), point to the poten-
tially lethal consequences of the shame-shame or shame-rage feeling traps. A
“feeling trap,” as they explain, “involves a series of loops of shame (being
ashamed of being ashamed), which causes further shame, which can continue
indefinitely,” or it involves a self-perpetuating chain of emotions in which “unac-
knowledged shame” leads to anger which, in turn, results in further shame
 White Trash Shame in Allison 121

(104–105). Moreover, when an individual has emotional reactions to his or her

own emotions and to those of another person, both individuals can become
mired in a feeling trap—“a triple spiral of shame and rage between and within inter-
actants,” which, in turn, can lead to the emotional impasse of an interminable
conflict (126). “Shame-rage spirals may be brief, lasting a matter of minutes, or
they can last for hours, days, or a lifetime, as bitter hatred or resentment” (127).
Moreover, shame-anger chains, according to Scheff and Retzinger, “can last even
longer than a lifetime, since hatred can be transmitted from generation to genera-
tion in the form of racial, religious, and national prejudice” (105).
4. By directing rage toward another, as shame theorist Michael Lewis explains,
the shamed individual attempts to ward off and undo shame “through a reinter-
pretation of the blame from an internal to an external cause” (150–151). Gershen
Kaufman, in his description of the “defending scripts” used to protect against
shame, explains that rage—“whether in the form of generalized hostility, foment-
ing bitterness, chronic hatred, or explosive eruptions”—functions to protect the
self against exposure and thus defends against shame. Like rage scripts, contempt
scripts protect the self, for “to the degree that others are looked down upon,
found lacking or seen as lesser or inferior beings, a once-wounded self becomes
more securely insulated against further shame.” Moreover, power scripts, which
aim at gaining power over others, also protect the self against shame. “When
power scripts combine with rage and/or contempt scripts, the seeking of revenge
is a likely outcome. . . . Now the humiliated one, at long last, will humiliate the
other” (Psychology 100, 101).
5. Allison, like other women who have written incest survivor stories, risks
being shamed again in a society in which survivor discourse has been exploited
by the mass media, treated as soft-porn commodities that appeal to the public’s
voyeuristic and erotic interests. In a discussion of the troublesome issues
surrounding media uses of survivor speech, Minrose Gwin explains how victim-
survivors “are often eroticized, and discussions of sexual violence are used to
titillate and expand audiences.” Consequently, speech about a taboo subject like
incestuous abuse “becomes a titillating media commodity objectifying the
survivor, stripping her of authority and agency, and thereby deflecting attention
away from the perpetrator and from societal responsibility for child abuse.
Numerous ‘Geraldo’ and ‘Oprah Winfrey’ shows—among others—produce
such effects” (421–422). See also Cvetkovich 358–361.
Discussing the eroticization of incest and violence in contemporary culture,
Allison remarks on the “standard American” movie-of-the-week plot in which
“the child is raped just as an excuse for daddy to go kill the rapist. . . . If it’s only a
plot factor, if its only motivation is for the man to feel good about himself or to
jerk off, it gets me ticked. It feels like my life has been used.” In Bastard Out of
Carolina, Allison explains, she “cut a lot of stuff out” to avoid such “pseudo-
porn” in her novel. As she comments, “There’s no description of genitals; there’s
no description of the actual act of intercourse except from the perspective of this
child who is being hurt terribly. For most of the book, you don’t even know what
the man is doing, and that’s very deliberate. Because a lot of what has messed
 122 Southern Literary Journal

with my head when I read other books has been the enormous gratuitous detail.
What always seemed to me to be missing was the enormous emotional impact.
All there is in Bastard is the emotional impact” (Strong 9).

works cited
Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. 1992. New York: Plume, Penguin, 1993.
____. “Believing in Literature.” Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature.
Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994. 165–181.
____. “A Question of Class.” Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature. Ithaca,
NY: Firebrand, 1994. 13–36.
____. “Skin, Where She Touches Me.” Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and
Literature. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994. 225–251.
____. Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. New York: Plume, Penguin, 1995.
Berke, Joseph. “Shame and Envy.” The Many Faces of Shame. Ed. Donald
Nathanson. New York: Guilford Press, 1987. 318–334.
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