DREAMING IN COLOR
Ruth Moose
Little Rock: August House, 1989
199 pp., $15.95 (cloth)
Paralysis creeps over the brain, the extremities grow numb, vision blurs, a low moan rises in the throat--a nightmare come true; yet another volume of short stores by a Southern woman! Enough! At last count there were 352,722 female authors in Dixie, all lashing their word processors to spit out short stories (or "short fictions," as the current lingo would have it). Hundreds of literary magazines--publications on the order to The East-South-Central-Tennessee Literary Quarterly, The Bugscuffle Journal of Arts and Letters, and The Skunk River Review of Metaphysics and Literature--exist solely to accommodate this pestering urge to appear in print.
Modernization has left a large segment of the Southern female population with time to kill. Granny was always busy; she quilted, canned vegetables, made jams and jellies, slopped hogs, tended chickens, milked cows, and raised a half-dozen or more babies. Granddaughter scribbles stories … or makes pottery, for there are also 321,612 female potters south of the Mason-Dixon line. Writers probably outnumber readers, or perhaps writers and readers are one and the same. Southern women used to swap stories across the back fence and in the churchyard after Sunday service; now they do it through literary journals.
The Southern woman's penchant for this genre is nothing new. During the heyday of the famed "Southern renascence," four women--Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor--elevated the art of the short story to its pinnacle in American letters. Inspired by this triumph, Southern women from Virginia to Texas purchased a ream of typing paper and launched a career in letters.
Mostly these neophytes emulated Eudora Welty; for her stories evince a deceptive simplicity that fools the innocent into thinking they can do as well. How hard can it be? Simply round up a few busybody old maids, add a trashy younger woman or two, and throw in a couple of salt-of-the-earth types; trick out these characters with colorful eccentricities and droll names (Ruth Moose's "Fronnie Laidlorn" and "Jolene Hunsucker" are perfect); plunk them down in a quaint Southern locale, preferably a small town; set them to gossiping, backbiting, and twittering about wayward kinfolk, capricious youngsters, feckless men, and shiftless, but lovable, blacks. Voila!: a short story.
Over the past several decades Southern women have composed thousands of stories based roughly on this model. Many of them are quite good, some of exceptional merit, but few are equal to those crafted by Welty herself. At their most undistinguished, the stories in Ruth Moose's Dreaming in Color induce a yawn of recognition: One has already plodded through dozens of such tales, sketches, and vignettes.
In an essay entitled "The Difficulties of Being a Southern Writer Today; or, Getting Out from under William Faulkner," Louis Rubin lamented the continuing tyranny that Faulkner exercises over the Southern literary imagination. His omnipresence forces every Southern novelist, even those born and raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, to write "Faulknerian" novels, replete with cotton
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