Question 1

Is Bastard Out of Carolina autobiographical?

Accepted Answer

Dorothy Allison has been consistently clear that Bastard Out of Carolina is fiction, not memoir, while also consistently acknowledging that it draws on her own experience of childhood sexual abuse in Greenville, South Carolina. The character of Bone is not a self-portrait, and the events of the novel are not a documentary record of Allison's childhood; Allison has said that writing the novel required her to construct a character whose experience parallels hers in some ways and diverges in others. The short autobiographical work Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995) is closer to Allison's own story, and should be read alongside the novel for readers interested in the relationship between autobiography and fiction in her work. What Allison consistently insists on is that the social conditions depicted in the novel — the poverty, the family violence, the class contempt from middle-class institutions, the way poor families are made to feel that their suffering is their own fault — are real conditions of real American life that fiction has rarely tried to portray from the inside.

Question 2

Why does Anney stay with Glen in Bastard Out of Carolina?

Accepted Answer

Anney's failure to protect Bone from Glen — and specifically her choice, at the novel's most devastating moment, to stay with Glen after discovering the full extent of his abuse — is the central moral problem of Bastard Out of Carolina, and Allison refuses the easy answer that Anney is simply weak or culpable. The novel shows the structural conditions that make Anney's choice intelligible: she is poor, she is a woman without resources, she is in love with a man who treats her well even as he treats her daughter monstrously, and she has no viable alternative in a world that offers few options to poor Southern women. Glen's violence toward Bone is partly motivated by his rage at Bone's existence as proof of Anney's first marriage and her sexual history — he is simultaneously attracted to and infuriated by Anney's past — and Anney's inability to see this fully is itself a product of her need to believe that her marriage is salvageable. The novel is unsparing about the cost of Anney's choice for Bone while also asking the reader to understand, without excusing, how a woman in Anney's position could make it.

Question 3

What role does class play in Bastard Out of Carolina?

Accepted Answer

Bastard Out of Carolina is as much a novel about class as it is about family violence, and Allison's insistence on the connection between the two is one of the things that distinguishes it from more conventional novels about child abuse. The Boatwright family's poverty is not incidental to Glen's violence: it is part of the same system that makes the family invisible to the authorities who might intervene, that makes Bone feel that her suffering is a personal failing rather than a social problem, and that makes the term 'white trash' — which the novel takes seriously as a class category, not just a slur — the organizing condition of the family's experience of the world. Allison has said that she wanted to write about poor Southern white life from the inside, without the condescension or the romanticization that characterizes most literary portrayals of such life; the novel's insistence that the Boatwrights are neither pathological exceptions nor noble poor people but rather ordinary people in impossible conditions is its deepest formal achievement.

Bastard Out of Carolina Reading Order

Complete Bastard Out of Carolina Book List