A Southern writer's retrospective : betrayal, rage and survival in the reconstruction fiction of Grace King

Abstract

This study is an examination of the metaphors, motifs, and symbols in the fiction of Grace Elizabeth King, a Louisianian whose work spans the period 1888-1932. It analyzes the characterization of women in her novels and short fiction, identifies recurring motifs, speculates about influences on her art, and discusses the relation of her writing to the local color movement as well as to larger trends in American literature, notably realism and naturalism. The pattern of images which emerges from King's fiction reveals the author's struggle to define her role as a woman of letters in the post-bellum South. Although she is today regarded largely as a minor local-colorist, her work is of special interest to students of the Civil War and Reconstruction era who particularly want to focus on experiences of Southern women and their contribution to American history and culture. King's three novels, Monsieur Motte (1888), The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard (1916), and La Dame de Sainte Hermine (1924), are complemented by some thirty-five short stories, in which the locus of the author's interest is the female character. Her theme, women's extraordinary strength, courage, and tenacity in a period of unprecedented upheaval, is given form by King's use of three specific motifs: womanhood, rage, and isolation. The first of these is the topic of Chapter II, which suggests that King conceptualized her heroines metaphorically: what happens to the woman in the tales parallels what had happened to the South as a whole. Chapter III is a rhetorical analysis which examines the author's use of irony in articulating rage. Chapter IV, a structural analysis, examines King's images of enclosure and imprisonment and concludes that the plantation, the poor house, the convent, and the balcony in the stories symbolize the South as a space in physical and cultural isolation. Black women are included as an integral part of King's feminine construct, and women, both individually and as a defined group, are viewed archetypically rather than stereotypically in their function as metaphors for the South. I find profound bitterness and unsettling rancor in Grace King's fiction, and though her motifs of abandonment, betrayal, and isolation suggest disillusionment, her art is just as surely marked by the indomitable.