Ellen Foster

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

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Background

Authorial Context: Kaye Gibbons

American author Kaye Gibbons was born Bertha Kaye Batts and grew up in North Carolina in a small home with no electricity or running water. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied literature. She began working on the idea that would become Ellen Foster through sketches around the character of Starletta years earlier but finished the manuscript for Ellen Foster when she was 26. She later revealed that elements of the novel were autobiographical; her father had an alcohol addiction, and her mother died by suicide when she was 10. After her father’s death, the author eventually found a home with her older brother, David, and his wife. She married her first husband, Michael Gibbons, in 1984.

Gibbons’s other novels include A Virtuous Woman (1989), A Cure for Dreams (1991), Charms for the Easy Life (1993), Sights Unseen (1995), On the Occasion of my Last Afternoon (1998), and Divining Women (2004), along with a sequel to Ellen Foster, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster (2005). Many of the novels explore themes of family relationships, particularly between mothers and daughters; the struggle of poverty; and the enduring harm of racism. Gibbons has also written about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder in her book Frost and Flower: My Life with Manic Depression So Far (1995).

Gibbons is often cast as a Southern writer with a strong understanding of the cultural struggles unique to the region with a compelling voice. She has received several rewards and accolades for her writing, including the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1998 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Oprah Winfrey chose Ellen Foster and Charms for the Easy Life for her popular book club. Ellen Foster has been hailed as one of the most unforgettable child characters in literature, on par with Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Socio-Historical Context: Race and Racism in the Southern United States

Ellen Foster is best understood in context of the entrenched anti-Black racism in the American South. In the 17th century, the economy of the Southern colonies from Maryland to Georgia depended on the farming of crops including rice, tobacco, and indigo. This labor was forced upon enslaved people who were sold as property and separated from their homeland and families. It was a practice of unspeakable cruelty, where women were raped by their enslavers and enslaved people were tortured or killed for even minor offenses, but especially for “rebellion,” or the attempt to escape. Additionally, enslaved people’s families were frequently separated at the whim of their enslavers. The United States made gradual moves to eliminate human chattel slavery over the 19th century, and the Civil War (1861-1865) was fought over this issue.

It took another century for the insistence on equal treatment of Black and white Americans to be enshrined in legislation during the civil rights movement, including the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. In the meantime, during the period called Reconstruction and after, the economy of Southern farming shifted to a system of sharecropping that bound workers to farms and landowners nearly as effectively as chattel slavery, by paying them so little they couldn’t afford to pursue education, find other employment, or pay off their debts incurred by “renting” farm equipment from the former plantation owners.

In addition, Southern states passed legislation that segregated Black people from white people in public areas and within public services like education and transportation. The laws, prevalent from 1877 onward, were collectively known as Jim Crow laws, after a minstrel show featuring a character called Jim Crow who perpetuated racist stereotypes. The goal of these laws to provide “separate but equal” facilities poorly camouflaged cultural prejudices and persistent, deadly racism. Decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Black Americans still combat racism, prejudice, and violence perpetrated against them due to the color of their skin. Activists, politicians, intellectuals, and others continue to lead the effort to dismantle the effects of white prejudice and anti-Black racism that can be encountered throughout the United States.

Literary Context: Coming-of-Age and Southern Literature

Southern literature is a subgenre of American literature that is set in the American South, usually meant to include the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, West Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Arkansas. These states seceded from the Union during the American Civil War. Locales set in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas are sometimes included in the designation. Southern literature indicates not just a geographical setting but also a culture. This includes literature inflected by shared concerns about class, race, or religion that have their roots in the colonial period and reflect the area’s long dependence on enslavement as an economic and social institution. However, it also includes contemporary writing that reflects the cultural diversity of the region, and many contemporary Southern authors resist the stereotype of Southern literature as focused on rural, less-educated, or racist characters.

Southern Gothic is a subgenre or style of literature set in the American South that borrows elements from Gothic literature, usually the frightening, unsettling, haunting, or strange. Writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty are often cited as writers of the Southern Gothic genre. The Southern Gothic genre investigates the violence resulting from persistent racism, poverty, and other class and culture-related struggles specific to the antebellum, post-Civil War American South. Gibbons’ work reflects the influence of these writers.

Though Ellen is only 11 when the story ends, hers is a coming-of-age story in that she illustrates the struggles that mature a young protagonist into adulthood or a new level of understanding about their place in the world. Ellen reaches a new level of maturity at her new mama’s, where she has found the loving, nurturing protector she longed for. She also reaches a new understanding of racial equality, and reinforces her relationship with Starletta, who represents Ellen’s coming to terms with her old life and self, but with new perspective. Ellen Foster reflects the tradition of such narratives that involve a narrator in the American South reaching a deeper understanding of the complex culture in which they live.