Bastard Out Of Carolina

Glenn’s hands are a symbol of abuse in the narrative. Like Glen, they are nervous, always on the verge of movement, and can quickly become instruments of violence. About them, Bone observes: “His hands were enormous. They hung like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-muscled arms” (35). It is his hands that Bone notices first, even before the abuse begins. Glen is tightly wound, anxious, and always seems to be watching her. He is prone to episodes of emotional volatility, both in the form of tears and fits of rage. Often, his hands are indicative of his emotional state, and Bone learns to watch them for clues of impending danger. He begins to grab at her, to clutch her to his chest, and to hold her tightly against his body. Even when not engaged in an act which Bones finds easy to characterize as sexual assault, his hands grip her tightly as he holds her in what feels like an inappropriate grasp. His mood swings are swift and often lack predictability or pattern, and the quick movements of his hands from a position of stillness to one of assault speak to the quickness of his temper. Even Bone’s uncles agree that, although not necessarily a man prone to fighting, Glen loses his temper frequently and cannot be trusted to remain even-tempered in the face of many stressors.

Hunger is a pervasive motif within the narrative, and it speaks to the broader theme of The Intersections of Class and Gender. Anney’s low-paying waitressing job, the best that she can find without education in her small, rural community, is emblematic of the kinds of labor open to women in her position during the 1950s. This kind of depiction is central to Allison’s project of representing the experiences not just of the impoverished, but of poor women specifically, and through it Allison shows the way that the gendered labor market impacted women in the rural South. Although class-based discrimination and oppression is felt equally by men and women, they do experience it from markedly gendered positions, and there were greater work opportunities for unskilled male workers than female ones during that era.

Bone and Reese are often hungry, but when they complain to Anney, she tells them that they do not know what true hunger is, and shares stories of her own childhood, when there was far less to eat than what Bone, Reese, Anney, and Glen have available to them now. This shows the generational nature of poverty: Anney herself had been born into an impoverished family and, lacking resources and privilege, she was not able to elevate her class position. This is in spite of years of hard work (for Anney is never without a job) and representations like this are a self-conscious desire on the part of the author to cast doubt on the attainability of the American Dream.

That Bone dreams of better meals, and Anney herself recounts make-believe games in which she and her siblings would concoct dream meals in their mind also speaks to the way that Bone uses dreams as a coping mechanism, using her daydreams to imagine a better life for herself than the one that she is living. Although many of her dreams are focused on the possibility of a world without abuse, she also dreams of food, and this shows the impact that class and poverty have on her coming-of-age years.