ABSTRACT

The photo on Bastard Out of Carolina's cover features a young, white girl with her head lowered, pressing her body against a barbed wire fence - the sharply focused flora of the print on her dress a shock against the blurred earth and patchy wasteland vegetation. In the background, a gaunt woman (perhaps her mother) with a raised hand shielding her eyes from the sun squints at the child. Although a number of scenarios could be read into this mise-en-scene, the image's political significance derives less from its formal content than from its status as one of Dorothea Lange's striking photos of impoverished rural Americans taken during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal's Farm Securities Administration documentation project.1 Standing as a synecdoche for Lange's celebrated body of work, the photograph plays into popular associations of Lange's images with sympathetic rural whites devastated by economic hardship and natural disaster. Something of an ethnographic pictorial study of poverty, Lange's photographs supported the New Deal's reorganization of US capitalism, working to establish a dominant set of codes with which to represent the poor and positively identifying the embodied effects of the Depression on the corpus of the noble poor. Reminiscent of Lange's sharecroppers and migrant Okies, the woman and child and their desolate environment symbolize undeserved poverty, raising the expectation that the novel, like Lange's familiar (now nostalgic) images of economic crisis, will aestheticize and humanize poor whites whose ability and desire to labor were undermined and eroded by forces beyond their control. Hence, with the melancholic girl's downcast, shadowy visage gracing its cover, Dorothy Allison's 1992 novel is immediately recognizable yet simultaneously overdetermined in its relationship to popular notions of white poverty.