Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing. (A Symposium: Women Writing the South).

Spacks, Patricia Meyer ; Gubar, Susan ; Wagner-Martin, Linda 等

Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, by Patricia Yaeger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xvii, 324 pp. $49 cloth. $18.00 paper. PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS University of Virginia

IN THIS BRAVE, PENETRATING, ORIGINAL STUDY, Patricia Yaeger sets out to challenge such grand abstractions as "the mind of the South" and "the Southern tradition." She begins with the, like we a dangerous little word in its repudiation of heterogeneity. Mind also raises a red flag, suggesting, as it does, serene rationality; and tradition, with its implicit linearity. On the other hand, Yaeger passionately believes in "the South" and "Southern." She celebrates the South as an imaginative and a literal region, important for literary, political, and, yes, spiritual reasons. Dirt and Desire intricately demonstrates the grounds of importance, making a persuasive argument for the crucial place of writing by women as part of any adequate understanding of the South.

The woman writers here considered, both African-American and Anglo-American, inhabit various geographic locales but share a common concern with a single region, the place of their ancestors, their origins, or their residence, and always of their imaginations. Most write prose fiction, although Yaeger considers also the occasional poet or memoirist. All concern themselves, directly or indirectly, with matters of race, an essential preoccupation of this investigation. They enable the critic to construct a new set of paradigms for understanding Southern literature.

Some of Yaeger's categories at first glance will seem familiar. She refers frequently, for instance, to the grotesque, and we have heard before about the Southern grotesque. But this critic offers rich new insight into the ways grotesque figures actually function in female fictions: not as Gothic decoration but as "a fluctuating, over-determined space where many things can happen at once" (p. 238)--political things and psychological things, different ways of declaring something wrong in society, something wrong with the female situation. The grotesque is not only Southern, Yaeger reminds us. "But its bizarrely opened bodies are particularly useful in bearing witness to the soul-puncturing rigidity of a culture where gender arrangements have been lacerating and racial cruelty is still taken for granted" (p. 232).

Dirt and Desire provides abundant examples of laceration and cruelty, from fiction and from history. The book's strength derives not only from its paradigms, which by their nature depend on abstraction and generalization, but from its substantiation for those paradigms. Like the women she writes about, Yaeger dwells--often painfully--in particulars. She describes not stories and novels so much as details within them; she delineates the fine structures of fiction and reminds her readers of how narrative operates by means of specificity. Stories move--move forward, and move their readers--through evoking the sharpness of experience. That sharpness in turn, as Yaeger richly demonstrates, often betokens meanings beyond the personal. A woman screams at the unexpected sight of a black child draped in one of her pale blue bath towels; the child jumps out the window to his death; his white playmate, the woman's son, follows him. Horrifying in itself, the episode (from a short story by Ellen Gilchrist) supplies the substance for a critic's social and ideological commentary. Gus, the black boy, is one of the "throwaway bodies" Yaeger finds everywhere in Southern fiction. When a white child joins him, the percipient reader mist reflect on what the two small boys have in common, what divides them, and how their common fate illuminates their cultures. Few readers can hope to match Yaeger's percipience.

Although her perceptiveness often displays itself in the critic's subtle reading of details, Dirt and Desire also has an elaborate theoretical superstructure. Its first chapter, "Southern Woman Writers: A Confederacy of Water Moccasins," announces nineteen new categories for the study of Southern literature, proclaims the list "only half done" (p. 13), and goes on to gesture at many more possible rubrics for interpretation. Yaeger can't possibly explore them all fully, but she indicates how they work and why they matter; several of them provide the focus for succeeding chapters. The categories begin with "convulsive white bodies" and "covert or hidden black mothers" (p. 12). They include place as a site of trauma, water as an image of sadness, the multiple meanings of consumerism, the importance of dirt, the relation between commerce and race, the power of occluded knowledge (including the hidden knowledge of race, never spoken by white women, and black women's hidden knowledge of ancestral meanings). Occasionally a "category" alludes to obvious subject matter or thematic material, but Yaeger uncovers in the obvious unexpected levels of significance, pondering, for example, why Southern woman writers may interest themselves in who works at the post office rather than in romance. More often, she calls attention not to obvious themes but to the importance of the ostensibly trivial: why it matters that a miller's face is covered with flour.

But the point is not just that Yaeger repeatedly proves herself a subtle reader of texts. The title of that first chapter, the allusion to water moccasins, demands attention. What does it mean to imagine Southern woman writers as a "confederacy" of poisonous snakes? The image refers directly to a story by Ellen Douglas that Yaeger summarizes and quotes, a story in which a beautiful white girl, water skiing, falls off her skis, gasps that she is entangled in barbed wire, and dies before her lover can pull her into the boat, a mass of snakes falling away from her body. To associate the chilling tale with the writers who provide this book's subject supplies an unexpected and disturbing tonality at the outset. Rightly understood, Yaeger suggests, these writers of a new confederacy possess the power to undermine, to destroy, complacent or grandiose understandings of the South.

The real water moccasin here may be Yaeger herself (in confederacy with her subjects), who punctures smooth surfaces with consistency and force. She does not seem a sinister figure, any more than Eudora Welty does. Like Welty, she claims self-doubt and good intentions; but she too relentlessly exposes concealed ugliness. The chief ugliness here--for Yaeger, for Welty, and for the book's other primary subjects--involves race, which women know as intimate disturbance. Black women nurse white children, who claim them as quasi-mothers. Occasionally, white women nurse black children. White men sleep with black women, who may bear white-appearing children; conversely, a woman who believes herself white may give birth to a "black" child. Black and white women alike listen as men talk, in one way or another, about death. Women prepare bodies for burial; women attempt to heal and to protect. Cut off from public power, black women may express their power in sheer physicality, terrifying or awe-inspiring. Such is the knowledge of the texts Yaeger considers, of their characters and their writers alike.

I called Dirt and Desire a brave book partly because it so openly confronts the great and terrible subject of race. Yaeger proposes that no understanding of American literature can claim adequacy without incorporating the crucial contributions of African-American writers. With due humility, she herself considers African-American critics, novelists, and poets along with their white counterparts. She does not claim, by any means, that woman writers of every color, every history, work to the same ends. Yaeger is not after "the" truth of Southern women's writing, some new version of "the mind of the South." On the contrary, she assumes and articulates multiple truths and techniques, implying a complex interweaving that cannot lend itself to encapsulating formulation. The plural minds she contemplates are shaped by race, a fact of consciousness rather than biology--and a fact itself of almost infinite complication, with every variety of guilt and suffering and power built into it. Her version of the South created by literature is far more interesting, in the serious sense of that much trivialized word (a sense including the meaning, important), than its more familiar alternatives, and interesting largely because it neither dodges nor reduces the implications of race. Nor does Yaeger claim fully to understand this matter of race, even in its literary avatars. She claims only the urgency of including it as a key category.

It will be clear by now that I admire this book: for its courage, its insight, its effort toward honesty. And for the nature of its reflexiveness. Yaeger works to remain fully conscious of exactly what she's doing--an effort inevitably doomed to incomplete success, but nonetheless important. She speaks of her own Southern roots and then worries about whether she is simply repeating the easy moves of many previous critics. Aware of the temptation to complicity with the assumed, she interrogates herself repeatedly. She tries to examine and define her own assumptions. She asks herself--and this is a rare gesture for critics--why her endeavor matters, and she answers that vital question cogently and fully, in ways valuable for her readers as well as, presumably, for herself.

Yaeger sees Dirt and Desire as an inaugural effort. If the book does its work, it will become one of many asking the same or comparable questions and continuing conjoined investigation of black and white writers with critical eyes on the political and social implications of the domestic as well as the public, struggling to create a nuanced understanding of Southern experience. The same questions, the same investigation, hold importance also for the development of feminist criticism, which has sometimes pursued its own forms of simplification.

As part of her program to value the intimate as well as the grand, Yaeger employs a personal, figurative, darting style that I sometimes found irritating (although also often compelling). Her rhetoric inadvertently reveals some of the strains of her undertaking and offers tacit warning to future literary critics who set out to further her enterprise. Three stylistic tics struck me as particularly revealing. The critic relies heavily on incredible and its cognates, along with adjectives like astonishing and amazing;, she introduces a great multiplicity of more or less rhetorical questions; and she frequently announces what she "wants to" say or accomplish. Each of these rhetorical habits speaks of tension.

Incredible, which sounds inappropriately girlish, strikes a jarring note at its first appearance, and its appearances are frequent. Yaeger speaks of "the incredible suspense that these tales generate" (p. 8), announces that "this rhythmic play of black and white is astonishing" (p. 107) [but why astonishing?], alludes to "women writers' amazing inventiveness" (p. 114) [why amazing?], to a character's "incredible music" (p. 124), and to a pair of characters' "incredible political dreams" (p. 163). She mentions that "McCullers and her characters share an incredible preoccupation with whether things can turn toward or into each other" (p. 174). She observes that in thinking about Southern women's literature one unearths "an incredible number of undernoticed ... themes" (p. 260). And so on. This does not even come close to being an exhaustive list, but it may suffice to indicate how Yaeger's adjectives sometimes claim easy emphasis while conveying a sense of evasiveness or uneasiness. Incredible, after all, means unbelievable. Even as Yaeger insists on how remarkable political dreams or music or undernoticed themes are, she hints a suspicion that her readers won't believe her.

The overabundance of questions and the "want to" formulations have a similar effect. Yaeger keeps saying that she wants to turn to, or argue, or propose, or suggest, or return to something, instead of just turning, arguing, or proposing. And she strings together great lists of questions, some of which she typically answers, some of which she appears to think require no answering. The specific effect of these strings differs, of course, from one instance to another, depending on the nature of the individual questions. But their cumulative impact registers uncertainty.

If I am right in diagnosing tension, strain, uncertainty, their presence is unsurprising: one more measure of the boldness and the difficulty of Yaeger's project. As more critics pursue it, it will presumably become easier and will feel less dangerous. In daring to tread such demanding terrain, Patricia Yager has begun to cut a path for the future. SUSAN GUBAR Indiana University

SOME TIME BEFORE Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 landed on my desk, I knew that its author, Patricia Yaeger, was an excellent teacher--not simply because one of my kids was privileged to take a course she offered at the University of Michigan, but also because I had learned so much from her resonant essay "Consuming Trauma; or, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating." Given my growing interest in Holocaust Studies, I was arrested by Yaeger's admonition in this piece, which was published in Journal X in 1997, that we inhabit an unseemly academic world "busy consuming trauma--busy eating, swallowing, perusing, consuming, exchanging, circulating, creating professional connections--through its stories about the dead" (p. 228). Can the critic mindful of her responsibilities to past brutality speak to or about the casualties of violence without lurid or vacuous, theatrical or theoretical vocabularies that glibly compromise or further "consume" people shockingly victimized by prior acts of dehumanization? In her latest book, Yaeger models an answer to this question as it pertains to her new definition of a Southern literary heritage based on the astonishing productivity of white and black women writers.

Perhaps because of my immersion in Holocaust writing, I see trauma at the heart of Yaeger's definition of a regional tradition that deals compulsively, obsessively with the wrongs of racism. The title of Dirt and Desire is meant to turn our attention to the grotesque narratives about "dirt, monstrosity, the throwaway, gargantuan women, old children, and the problem of arrested systems of knowledge" circulated by women authors like Kate Chopin and Carson McCullers, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, Lillian Smith and Ellen Douglas, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, Rita Dove and Lucille Clifton (p. 8). Who owns, who cleans dirt? Whose bodies are thrown away, dead or alive, like dirt? Who frets or fevers over feeling dirty? These questions, given a racial twist, imbue the grotesque with political ferocity for Yaeger's poets and fiction writers. By integrating the New Negro Renaissance into the canon of Southern letters, Yaeger can direct readers to the ways in which a host of Anglo- and African-American creative writers deal with slave and domestic labor, lynching, the Black church, the Great Migration, discriminatory legislation, civil rights activism, and the casual, everyday indignities of racial insults. Not unlike many contemporary Jewish authors after the Shoah, Southern women writers register their horror at crimes perpetrated on a massive scale against a minority made into a pariah class, even as they comprehend the ongoing repercussions of such crimes in the present as well as the burden of responsibility they place on future generations.

At least to my eyes, the marks of Nazi fascism are everywhere on the South depicted in the pages of the literature studied in Dirt and Desire. Yaeger's foregrounding of black bodies cast away and invisibly melting into the landscape recalls the Jews disposed like waste in the fields of Poland. Without proper burials or funerals or mourning rituals, such bodies generate a landscape loaded with the living dead, haunting ghosts, unacknowledged crimes, insidious ongoing acts of sometimes private, sometimes public desecration and excavation. Just as Holocaust narratives tend to focus on railroad tracks, on the grotesque products (hair, soap, teeth) garnered from human beings defined as contaminates, and on the moral pollution of such manufacturing processes, Yaeger--who wants "to dynamite the rails" of normative definitions of "the Dixie Limited" (p. 34)--writes of black children "made out of soap" and yet historically associated with the dirt of the earth (p. 37) by whites afraid of being contaminated by physical contact with a racialized Other. In Dirt and Desire, "rags" become a resonant metaphor of people treated as worthless, disposable rubbish, much as the word "Schmattes" (rags) was used to characterize the Jews in the Shoah. Yaeger describes films in which characters guilty of a sort of soul-murder against black people smear their faces "with ashes" (p. 90), of the banality and evil of "white panic" (p. 11).

Like Adorno, who questioned the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, Yaeger repeatedly asks how such painful, perplexing experiences could possible create an aesthetic. Like Adorno (later ill his life), she wonders as well, how could it not? Understandably, then, an early passage of Yaeger's study highlights Flannery O'Connor's "Displaced Person," with its characters' visions of the dead words and naked bodies piled up in European newsreels, while it concludes with an extended meditation on the significance of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's now classic book about Holocaust representation, Testimony, with its emphasis on the necessity of witnessing precisely those traumatic memories that could not be assimilated into consciousness through normative cognitive mechanisms. Yet what makes Dirt and Desire a particularly important contribution to the mapping of literary geography is the eery way in which these analogies haunt the various chapters without being pursued by Yaeger, who remains steadfast in her commitment to the specificity of Southern women's artistic productions as they relate to the details of American history. Indeed, especially useful are Yaeger's analyses of the oddly subtle, barely visible, rarely acknowledged, often unconscious mores and manners that quite politely prop up a lethal system of oppression never overtly genocidal.

What animates Yaeger's attention to what she calls the "unthought known" or "white ways of not knowing" (p. 111) in women's literature derives from a now familiar but still very important precept in feminist criticism, namely that because literary history in general and the literary history of the South in particular were written by, for, and about men, women writers' achievements have been either marginalized or misunderstood. If the Southern tradition is supposed to be characterized by an epic struggle with the land, by white men's quest for a lost community, their nostalgia for the past and dread of miscegenation, Southern women writers will be reduced to minor players with bit parts. Substituting Zora Neale Hurston for William Faulkner, Yaeger places at the center of her study the extraordinary, productivity of black and white female poets and novelists who focused on the South. Instead of viewing this archive as domesticated or modest, Yaeger provides a series of smart interpretive readings that prove how seemingly minor narrative incidents represent the everyday, quotidian realities of people coping with the traumatic historical forces at work in the aftermath of slavery, not the least of which was the societal injunction never to acknowledge those segregating forces in public languages.

Even as a typical chapter in Dirt and Desire proposes a new set of characters (like the throwaway or the gargantuan woman) or a new set of metaphors (like rags or crossover objects), it sets out an unnerving number of methodological hoops that have to be jumped through. First, Yaeger attempts throughout to emphasize the cross-racial interaction that characterizes American society. Here, like many contemporary scholars, she implicitly argues against the segregation of a "black" versus a "white" literary tradition and instead seeks a comparative approach which neither conflates (as identical) nor contrasts (as antithetical) cultural legacies in a dialogic conversation. Second, she wants to keep gender in interpretive play, without necessarily assuming any monolithic commonalities that all female or all male writers share. Third, the social history of Jim Crow legislation and civil rights activism from the 1930s until the 1990s furnishes the political background her authors engage. Fourth, as her reliance on Mary Douglas's work on pollution suggests, Yaeger draws on anthropological as well as psychoanalytic theory to understand the dynamics of racial hostility and gender anxiety. Finally, although she takes issue with conventional critics of Southern literature, she is careful to document her indebtedness to feminist scholars, especially those working in African-American Studies. If jumping through all these hoops sometimes results in somewhat predictable moves, the fault may lie more with the state of criticism at the present time than with this particular critic.

Although some readers may take issue with the authors Yaeger deems Southern--her criterion seems to be subject matter, rather than place of birth or where they decided to live out their writing lives--most will be captivated by prose at times breath-taking in the urgency of its lyricism. I suspect that most, too, will end up enthralled by Yaeger's candor, for example her willingness to admit the pleasure she takes in morally questionable or even reprehensible dirty writing. Dirt and Desire will become an important book not only for lovers of Southern literature but for all those working in cultural studies with a resolve not to "consume" trauma. When Yaeger reminds us that in 1945 the Senator from Mississippi, James Eastland, gave a speech about what he considered to be the abysmal performance of black troops in Hitler's Germany--"I am proud of the white race. I am proud that the purest of white blood flows through my veins. I know that the white race is a superior race" (p. 273)--she helps us understand the painful pervasiveness of a racism that many of the finest Southern women writers knew could never simply be swept under the rug. LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

READERS EXPECT THIS KIND or COGENT brilliance from Patricia Yaeger. Her Honey-Mad Women a decade ago has been followed by her editing or co-editing important collections, and by her own published essays. In all her work, Yaeger takes the sometimes stranglingly traditional assumptions of a field and challenges those assumptions by broadening, rather than limiting, them.

In Dirt and Desire, she looks at Southern women's fiction published between 1930 and 1990. The assumptions she works against are three:

1) that Southern women's writing is somehow daintily miniaturized. Rather, says Yaeger, these works are the writings of such giants as Zora Neale Hurston and Carson McCullers, writers who have created giants of women characters.

2) that Southern literature is written about the cohesiveness and strength of family. Rather, says Yaeger, its most compelling stories are about its "throwaways" (p. xi), about characters who experience the absence of family.

3) that racial epistemologies have yet to be created and then scrutinized as a means of classifying "Southern" to mean "Southern white," abandoning African-American writers to oblivion--or at least to a separate category. As Yaeger discusses what she terms "the unthought known" (p. xii), this relegation of black expression to some non-regional particularity has, in effect, enervated the field of Southern studies entire.

It is the latter situation that intrigues Yaeger the most, and in her aim to correct the perception by filling in the missing segments, she insists that her study will "undomesticate Southern women's fiction by inventing more dangerous, up-to-date, culturally acute terms for examining a rich and underread literature" (p. xv). To achieve this aim, Yaeger replaces what she sees as the paralyzing dominance of Faulkner studies (which define Southern literature as "epic") with serious study of such women writers as Alice Walker and Eudora Welty, who present so accurately "the nonepic everyday" (p. xv).

Yaeger sets much of her textual discussion against her clearly expressed focus--"the insistence that southern literature, at its best, is not about community but about moments of crisis and acts of contestation, about the intersection of black and white cultures as they influence one another and collide" (p. 38). Her reading of Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland, with the dilemma of Margaret Copeland paralleling that of Kate Chopin's Desiree, provides the kind of fusion of themes heretofore overlooked in Southern studies.

Throughout Dirt and Desire, Yaeger provides readings unexpected in both their thematic and their historical information. To contest what historical memory tells us the 1930s provided--as she does with her commentary on Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Mitchell's Gone with the Wind--and to extend that contestation with the startling chapter on the sizes and shapes of characters' bodies in Southern women's fiction is to force us to read past the stereotypes. (Yaeger has demolished our sense of the delicate and ladylike Southern authors and their congruent characters: here we are made to see the grotesqueries of Eudora Welty's fiction as well as those of McCullers's and Porter's and O'Connor's.)

There is little that is innocent about the grotesque. As Yaeger defines it in one of the strongest chapters of her study, drawing from a range of critics from Zizek to Wyatt-Brown to Michael O'Brien, the Southern grotesque can easily be linked with a Bakhtinian carnivalesque. But as she contends, "Carnivalization veers into degradation as black men ... become throwaways--ciphers defigured, depersonified, subordinated.... Women writers employ the grotesque dynamically--to repersonify people and ideas who have disappeared" (p. 231). What differs about Southern writers' use of the grotesque is that it is pervasively aimed at depicting a culture "where gender arrangements have been lacerating and racial cruelty is still taken for granted" (p. 232).

Yaeger dismisses the notion that anything about the South, or its current literature, is nostalgic. Rather, its most acute (read, women) writers are demanding ones, whose primary tactic in fiction is to disprove a number of the social stereotypes which have long been connected to Southern writing. The comparative paucity of work on twentieth-century Southern women's writing is the occasion for her book, and she claims that such work is not only important in itself, but serves to create some new paradigms for the study of Southern literature entire. One of the reasons Yaeger makes this claim is that many of the women writers of the past century (or, better, century and a half) were themselves raised by black women (even as the children of those same black women were robbed of their mothers' care). That race is integral to life in the South, and to the consciousnesses of its writers, must be recognized. One of her pervasive questions is "What is the status, in white women's fiction, of African American women's voices, speech, writing?" Another theme is "the power of African Americans to rescript the meaning of" such writing (p. 254).

Yaeger also points to the "extraordinary formal power of fiction" by these women writers, whose "literature stirs up new ways of thinking about labor and object relations, and about the ways in which commodities become magnets for labor, points of crossover, exchange, blockage, or leakage between black and white cultures" (p. 254). And finally, as if to emphasize the changes that need to occur in scholarly treatments of the American South, Yaeger contends, "To think at all about southern women's literature--and literature by black women who write about the south--is to unearth an incredible number of undernoticed, still-to-be analyzed, still-to-be-historicized themes" (p. 260). As we expected, Dirt and Desire sets readers on those unfamiliar paths, even as it provides information both textual and theoretical to help on such an ambitious journey. MICHAEL KREYLING Vanderbilt University

"I'M TIRED OF THESE CATEGORIES" (p. ix). Patricia Yaeger lays her cards face up on the table in the "Prologue" to Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. The "categories" at issue constitute the veteran formula for interpreting, periodizing, and thematizing Southern literature: place, history (tragedy and defeat), poverty and colonial status, the myth of a "golden age," race and guilt--the whole megilla that Quentin gives up trying to explain to Shreve in Absalom, Absalom!; that Cash, Woodward, Brooks, Rubin and their (mostly male) disciples have repeated down to the day before yesterday. It is not only the choke-hold of the "categories" that riles Yaeger and gives her book its spin and vigor; it is also that the "categories" and permission to play with them have for too long been reserved for boys.

Embedded deep in the book (Ch. 6, p. 153) is a counterattack on the (by now) corpse of Fred Hobson's claim, in The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, that Southern women writers have not written or cannot write "the ambitious novel, the work concerned with the sweep of history or with the public arena or both." (1) Yaeger is out to prove, in Dirt and Desire, that Southern women writers both black and white not only can deal with history, but have always done so. The only reason we have not fully appreciated this achievement is that the categories and patriarchal control of them have prevailed as practices of "mystification in order not to know" (p. 34). Yaeger uses Dirt and Desire "to turn up the volume on southern studies by providing a new set of categories for examining southern women's fiction, to find new terms for cataloging its arrested systems of knowledge" (p. 11). What is to be demystified are the white South's "subsemantic obsessions about race and gender" (p. 8).

The interpretive technology for revealing the obsessively hidden is, Yaeger admits, not new, "the grotesque." "Clearly the grotesque is not a static form," Yaeger grants (p. 30)--and her usage of it is elastic enough to escape charges of being formulaic. One stumbling block (to this reader, anyway) is that her deployment of this interpretive technology is woven into, and in the main often precedes, her explanation of its constituent parts and how she sees them at work. This is an important point, I think, because Yaeger's "grotesque" is definitely, but often subtly, not the Southern grotesque of conventional criticism. It is not the grotesque as, for example, critic Rachel Adams employs it in a recent article: "`A Mixture of Delicious and Freak': The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers," American Literature (September 1999), pp. 551-583. Adams handles the grotesque in McCullers in a traditional way: the non-normative proportions of the bodies of the central characters indicate marginalized rebuttals to the norms of race, gender, and sexuality as enforced by the patriarchy, Frankie's father Royal Addams. The feminist grotesque, as Yaeger forges it, is more nuanced: even the Fairchild women of Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding can qualify because their very female-ness is put into brackets by a patriarchal discourse that seeks to control all it surveys. So, the reader encounters unfamiliar claims of the grotesque in operation before he/she is equipped with the revisionary model.

This is where and how I, a white male reader of Dirt and Desire, rub against its grain. I want to appropriate (not simply read) Yaeger's study, imposing on it just the kind of tiring (perhaps) and gendered (also perhaps) rational, cumulative narrative to which her hyperbolic and obsessive praxis stands in opposition. I want to make its beginnings, middles, and ends march in Aristotelian order. That very reaction, I think, implicates me in some of the categories Yaeger wants to demolish.

For this kind of appropriative reader of Dirt and Desire, I might recommend starting with Chapter Nine, currently the final chapter, and then moving on to Chapter Eight, which circles around a reading of Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream. Reading these two chapters first--like viewing a museum exhibition from the exit back toward the entrance--would equip a new reader with a workable sense of "the grotesque" and a window (perhaps intended, perhaps not) on the autobiographical investment of the critic. This reverse (perverse?) reading would also mitigate Yaeger's avowed obsessive technique by supplying something like answers before the questions piled up in such quantity. In any case, the reader will make up her own mind.

What is to be gained by my appropriative reading is, arguably, a deepened sense of the woman writing Dirt and Desire. For example: In Chapter One Yaeger presents an autobiographical self who remembers her Southern family employing black domestics whom she knew only by their first names, who remembers perhaps falsely blacks on chain gangs in North Florida in the 1950s, and who roots her own sense of self in the somatic memory of being "gargantuan or oversized in a world of petite and belle-like little girls" (p. 2). This supplies more than the customary load of curiosity with which one begins reading a book of literary criticism. Is Yaeger telling us that she herself is an actual grotesque? That her memory of blacks on Florida chain gangs is illusory but still somehow genuine? For this reader, something like an answer does not begin to appear until much later.

One indication, in Chapter Eight, that a kind of an answer is coming is the emergence of an "anxiety of influence" at work in Dirt and Desire. With many (of us) male Southern critics the focus of anxiety is Faulkner, or Louis D. Rubin, Jr., or Lewis Simpson, or C. Vann Woodward. For Yaeger, it is none of the above--it is Lillian Smith.

First, though (to mimic one of Yaeger's obsessive postponements and detours in the argument of Dirt and Desire), "the grotesque." Yaeger's "grotesque" is related to, but consciously revisionary of, Mikhail Bakhtin's, as set forth perhaps most familiarly in his Rabelais and his World (1968). Bakhtin historicized the grotesque as the carnivalesque, embedding it thereby in a social calendar of ritual behaviors in Europe during the late Middle Ages. In Bakhtin's dialectic the grotesque, or carnivalesque, functions as the antithesis to the official. At certain ordained moments in the public calendar (Mardi Gras, for example) the grotesque, ordinarily sub rosa (or "subsemantic," to import Yaeger's term), was allowed out of confinement and into the public sphere--carnival. At the dawn of Ash Wednesday, the official matrix of powers and prohibitions ("terms" and "categories") reclaimed the site of social behavior. Ideally, in Bakhtin's dialectical sublime, a new synthesis had been forged--every cycle of the calendar, a new synthesis. But Yaeger intends the grotesque to be more obsessive in subversion: unlike Bakhtin's grotesque, which at least in its sublime fruition reaches some kind of balance if not perfection, Yaeger's "repudiates the consolation of social critique" (p. 230). Hence (perhaps) the call for obsessiveness and hyperbole.

The repudiation of consolation is constant because, in Yaeger's view, the white, male, official matrix of Southern cultural thought is and has been incorrigibly repressive on the themes of race and gender--whiteness and compulsory heterosexuality. Yaeger matches the old narrative's obsessiveness with her own, "my not-so-secret obsession, the southern grotesque" (p. 259). The key imagery in this obsession, marking the route through the maze, is dirt. "We also need to explore [Southern] women writers' exuberant, hyperbolic, and sensuous obsession with dirt" (p. 260). Hyperbolized dirt--not the crumbly red soil Scarlett clutches in Gone With the Wind (but not unrelated), and not the mythic "land" of the Agrarians (but not unrelated either)--is for Yaeger the fundamental vocabulary of a metaphysics. As such it can be generously reinscribed as rags and other throwaway things too mundane for official, meaningful notice. Dirt can also be translated as the material body--not the officially beautiful body of "petite and belle-like little [Southern] girls" (p. 2)--but that ideal's conceptual and actual antithesis: "the southern gargantua" (p. 139). The Southern gargantua ranges, in texts by Southern woman writers, from Miss Eckhart in Welty's "June Recital" (whose material body we never actually see), to McCullers's Frankie Addams, and (probably most significantly) to Lillian Smith's body.

The engine that gives these Southern female bodies power to generate meanings is not just or solely outsized, or freakish, height, weight, proportions, or sexuality. What gives the Southern gargantuan body her culturally expressive, and hyperbolic, power is its "self-dramatizing alignment with the southern grotesque" (p. 247), in effect organizing and rendering readable the South's obsessive "unthought known" (p. 219)--its obsession with racialized bodies (Emmett Till, Berenice, Mammy) and the sexualized bodies of Southern women.

This is where Lillian Smith becomes indispensably important to Yaeger's work, for Smith's work and, equally importantly, her position as a white, Southern, woman critic of the Southern status quo, function as verification of Yaeger's viewpoint and praxis. The centrality of Smith and the concomitant importance of the grotesque are no more clearly set forth than in Chapter Eight. The chapter begins with one of Yaeger's periodic reprises of her book's thesis: This panoply of bodies in process or bodies in pain, this parade of beings on the rim, the painful margin of southern society [as represented in the immediate context in texts by McCullers and Welty], appear without ceasing in stories by southern women. One of the problems I've set out to answer in Dirt and Desire is--why? What causes this obsessive presence in southern literature? What is the source of this impressive display of misfits, dimwits, giant women, and lunatics? One answer is the need to invent new forms for thinking about the unthought known and to circumvent the rigid system of race and gender, the" normal" deformities of southern culture. (p. 219)

For Yaeger in Dirt and Desire, Lillian Smith is the woman with the answer to the questions, an answer prior to the literary answers of McCullers and Welty, and others, whose usage of the grotesque would not be critically or politically viable without the base in lived white, Southern, women's experience that Smith supplied. It is Smith's blend of autobiography and imagined form that forges the linkage between the grotesque body and the body politic (p. 222), and thus enables the metaphorical system as a whole. With Smith's eyewitness experience as validation, Yaeger can achieve one of the most thorough and cogent explanations of her working concept of the grotesque (pp. 224 ff). The grotesque is fundamentally a political language in which the silenced Southern population of women writers (black and white) have expressed dissent from the official ideology of race and gender by figuring the "unthought known" in the grotesque, maimed, or deformed body, or just as often in the female body generally. Yaeger places this system of expression and communication on the "subsemantic" level of discourse. The categories and terms that have occupied the semantic level--for too long, in Yaeger's view--need to be retired so that the last can become first, the bottom rail put on top (p. 60). Frequently in Dirt and Desire, from the Prologue onward, this aim is expressed, but not until Chapter Eight is the critical means or praxis so clearly linked with the ends.

Perhaps the linkage is clearest in this chapter because the debt to Lillian Smith is finally and openly acknowledged. Establishing bona fides in Southern criticism is not a new move, or even a feminist one. Richard King, in the introduction to A Southern Renaissance (1980), identifies himself in the South. (2) This writer has even tried the compulsory moves in Inventing Southern Literature (1998). (3) Philip Weinstein, in What Else But Love? (1996), cited among Yaeger's sources, gives perhaps the fullest. But I don't think any of us has revealed as much, in terms of a debt to a single precursor, as Yaeger has in her tribute to Lillian Smith. Here is a crucial passage from Chapter Eight: ... Smith compares the experience of being southern to the anguish created by an instrument of torture that turns southern children into creatures wracked by social and psychic deformities. [The episode on which Yaeger is commenting is the one in Killers of the Dream in which the young girl Lillian learns that a classmate, thought to be white, is discovered to be "black," and is thus exiled from her friendship.] Her indictment may be florid, her prose hyperbolic and sweeping, but this is part of the point. For Smith, to be a white Southerner is to know and be the grotesque--to overwrite, overread, and participate in an economy of cruelty, defensiveness, reaction formation, and overcompensation. Within this economy, morality, maturity, or even the decision to cast off the worst forms of racism offers no shelter against the power of a self-stunting habitus. (pp. 246-247)

It is one very small step to read "Yaeger" for "Smith" in this paragraph, for in describing her vision of the work of Smith's texts, Yaeger gives a perfect rendition of her own "hyperbolic and sweeping" technique. Indeed, Yaeger seems to find her own ground as a critic in a nearly-contiguous passage describing the operations of the grotesque as grounded in the particular deployment of the trope by Smith: If the grotesque body offers heterogeneous routes to southern pathologies, if its acts of surplus mutilation work emotionally and cognitively to undo normal readings of space and time, it is also a trope that bears witness to its own inadequacies. It is hyperbolic, uneven, and comic, and yet it plunges us into bizarre acts of transference. In other words, the grotesque mimics the quandary of living between an intelligible body inhabiting intelligible space and an unthinkable, unintelligible body that endures a terrible relativity. (That is, Smith uses the grotesque to give this shared relativity a regional depth. If the literary, grotesque becomes a paradoxical space where the private body and the regional or national body come together, it is also, for Smith, a place of slippage where the South's regional story comes apart.) (p. 247)

Where Smith stands, so does Yaeger.

This powerfully, personally, painfully energized position enables Yaeger to accomplish some truly innovative readings and rearrangements of familiar Southern authors: "bizarre acts of transference." Her evocation of the unthought known in Welty's Delta Wedding, for example, will permanently change the way we read that, so-called, apolitical novel. By tracing the signs of "the `secret' of unacknowledged labor" in Welty's novel from the image of a simple tea cup (pp. 98 ff), Yaeger links Delta Wedding with Gone With the Wind as major, but surreptitious, feminist critiques of the orthodoxy on race and gender enforced by actual social beings (men) and literary forms (the plantation romance). Her hyperbolic, Smith-ian approach to these two novels is, perhaps, an example of overreading, hyperbole as a deliberate critical gambit: she links the plot of Raintree County, pivoting on the image of the grotesquely disfigured doll that becomes the obsessive fixation of the heroine, with the body of Emmett Till, perhaps Southern history's most recognizable image of the reality of the unthought known (p. 91). One of the flaws, however, in Yaeger's obsessive/hyperbolic technique is its inherent lack of patience: the "transference" from Raintree County and Emmett Till to Delta Wedding and Gone With the Wind would work if it were developed rather than sketched--that is, if there were a fuller connection of the novel Raintree County with the film, a fuller examination of the hidden subtext of work in Delta Wedding.

It is another gambit like this one, opening Chapter Six, that most clearly expresses Yaeger's usage of hyperbole as critical praxis: the historical image of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sitting with the black delegates to a biracial conference on economic and racial problems facing the South, held in Birmingham in 1937. Yaeger holds the hated Roosevelt's move as a tactical assault on the subsemantic, Southern orthodoxy on race and gender (pp. 152-153). She uses it also as a route to the interior of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, in which the two grotesque bodies of Frankie and Berenice are subsumed and foreshadowed by the corporeally unified, but spatially dislocated, white woman's body of Eleanor Roosevelt positioned precisely where it had to be in order to scandalize the "official." The reading of The Member of the Wedding thus triggered is both controversial and familiar. Familiar, in that the sexual and racial politics of McCullers's novel (and the play reduced from it) have been fairly widely discussed. Controversial, in that Yaeger wants to use her reading of the novel to overturn C. Vann Woodward's categories of Southern interpretation by replacing his "reading of southern history as epic or tragedy with the revisionary histories of black and white women who deploy an archive of surrealist, subsemantic, and everyday histories to refigure the public sphere" (p. 184). This might, in fact, be a phantom either-or, for Woodward was no stranger to the surreal played on the so-called empirical stage of history, especially in his The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Nevertheless, the bold assertion that Eleanor Roosevelt was a performance artist when she sat with black people in public in 1937 is one of the liberating insights that energize Dirt and Desire.

As provocative as Dirt and Desire is, and for all the lasting impact Yaeger's work has had (beginning with her ground-breaking PMLA article on Eudora Welty, "`Because a Fire Was in My Head,'" 99 [1984], 955-973) and will continue to have on Southern literary studies, there is a self-endangering edge to the hyperbolic technique of Dirt and Desire. It leaves little nicks and paper cuts at moments in the text like the swipe at Woodward at the conclusion to Chapter Six. There is the "Woodward" who stands for the male-controlled orthodoxy, and then there is the Woodward among whose numerous works there is a fine appreciation of surrealist southern "theater" of self-representation. There is the danger, also, of being so "sweeping" as to lose sight of traps in the laudable attempt to retire one set of "categories" and replace them with others. Even dissenters can indulge in "mystification." As with many critical arguments that berate a predecessor for universally controlling discourse, the replacement comes perilously close to doing the same. Black writers, with the possible exception of Zora Neale Hurston, Yaeger asserts, "are not especially interested in writing about white culture" (p. 257). But a moment in rebound would suggest that Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison--for different reasons and at different temperatures--were/are "interested" in white culture and have written very perceptively of the unthought known of racial mores, even though they did not call it by that term.

More perilous, though, is the ledge over which Dirt and Desire might plunge into a kind of Southern, feminist sublime. Faulkner, of course, is responsible for validating the white, male, Southern sublime in Absalom, Absalom!: "You cant understand it. You would have to be born there." Yaeger comes very close to pulling a "Quentin" under the protection of Lillian Smith. The grotesque body presents, then, a riddle that will not go away. It is not just a worn-out, "torn-away frame" but a framework that tears. Far from being domesticated, as southern women move from the twenties to the fifties and sixties, the grotesque gets wilder and less manageable; it functions as a sign of nonintegration, a signal from a world that practices segregation without reprieve. Its excess of meaning (this awkward figure that endures too much mutilation and invites comedy in its whiff of excess) functions with precise imperfection; it opens a space of permeable, ongoing disturbance and offers another way of engaging with the reader's soma: a kind of contact zone where the reader runs smack into ideology--but ideology, as body and blood. (p. 249)

Robbed, in this excerpt, of most of the context of the chapter in Dirt and Desire for which it serves as climax, this passage nevertheless suggests that the reader would have to be born female in body and Southern in region, certainly to inscribe the subsemantic tropes, but possibly also to read them. Charges and countercharges of essentialism always make for intense arguments, and I think Yaeger's work will spark a few.

If the hyperbolic technique of Dirt and Desire has a virus, this is probably where it lies--the fierce dedication to its own premises, a dedication that means that, at times, the answer to Yaeger's question is "Yes, sometimes your book does go too far." This supposed weakness might, in the ironic way of things, conceal an unexploited resource in Dirt and Desire. Yaeger's replacement theory for "place." The grotesque, as Yaeger interprets it, privileges character and gender while assuming the same dark Southern history of war and remembrance, racial violence and protest, and the cultural imprisonment of the female body within the "rape complex." By freeing her obsession with the grotesque Yaeger shuffles her equally impressive rethinking of place and event. In her earlier editor's "Introduction: Narrating Space" to a collection of essays on place and places, The Geography of Identity (University of Michigan Press, 1996) Yaeger points the way to a new reading of place that tries to mute the seen and raise the unseen connections between self and history "encrypted" in place: The omnipresence of political encryption [in representations of place] requires a new self-consciousness about the relation of place and narration: it demands the invention of a poetics of geography: a site for investigating the metaphors and narrative strategies that we use to talk about space. The invention of such poetics will require, above all, a rhetoric that can unearth the strange effects of ordinary, space: place-centered narration not only refocuses our attention on the ways in which place is political; it necessitates the geographic of the ghost story--an awareness of the irreducible strangeness of space and a narrative capable of addressing its encryption. (pp. 5-6)

It is the unbearable strangeness of Southern space that Yaege'r inhabits in Dirt and Desire. To be contrarian one final time: it is not only the category of the grotesque that obsesses Yaeger, but the absolute strangeness of Southern place, a "category" that her precursors have taken to be subsumed by official history. Yaeger's new map would reinterpret place as a geography of unequaled strangeness, literally and figuratively under the ground with the body of Emmett Till and above the surface the living with our meanings for it.

(1) Fred Hobson, The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 78.

(2) Richard King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. vii.

(3) Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. xi. JAY WATSON University of Mississippi

HERE, AS THE SAYING GOES, IS GOD'S PLENTY.

As its title promises, this long-awaited book is dense with the desire of Southern women, not least of all that of the author herself. Nor is that desire filtered through the genteel conventions of Southern ladyhood or the equally refined formulas of Southern literary criticism. It is out in the open, surfacing in every chapter and at times on nearly every page of Dirt and Desire--dazzling, audacious, insurrectionary, and as the author herself might say, gargantuan. "I want to dynamite the rails" of Southern literary studies, writes Yaeger, in what is destined to be her book's most quoted line (p. 34). But that line only begins to suggest her ambition. "I want to begin with a parable--a story about beauty ravaged into bestiality, about the eruption of monstrosity in a climate and setting where one least expects it" (p. 2); "I want to argue that [the] traditional categories [of Southern literary criticism] represent mystifications in order not to know, mystifications designed to overlook the complexities of southern fiction" (p. 34); "I want to focus on ideas that are present but unacknowledged--on thought itself as an act of refusal" (p. 94); "I want southern women writers to take up more space" (p. 113); "I want to map the bizarre psychological and political effects of grotesque bodies in southern women's fiction" (p. 115); "I want to note how close ecstatic ideas of pollution can come to the throwaway" (p. 276)--has any critic of Southern writing ever dared to want so much from Southern women--and for them--as Patricia Yaeger? And to want it all aloud?

Yaeger's reply throughout Dirt and Desire is that Southern women's writing has suffered from the low expectations of critics who haven't dared to want or ask enough of it. (And yes, she names names.) It has been diminished and domesticated, relegated to the dustbin of Southern literary history for being insufficiently epic in its sweep, insufficiently monumental in its historicity, insufficiently public in its politics. Its limits, moreover, have been kept arbitrarily narrow by the unwillingness or inability of many influential critics to recognize black women writing about the South as Southern. For Yaeger, by contrast, "southern women's writing" means all writing by women that is significantly "invested in thinking about the South" (p. 56), regardless of the writer's racial or even regional identity. Dirt and Desire therefore sets out "to explore the density and peculiarity of southern women's fictions across racial boundaries" (p. ix) and to reenergize Southern literary studies by mapping and mining the formal, thematic, and canonical possibilities that emerge from this conjunction, in an attempt to do for Southern writing what Hazel Carby did for African-American writing in Reconstructing Womanhood.

The resulting taxonomy--or as Yaeger calls it, an archive (p. 49)--is simply breathtaking in its originality and power. Southernists will be wrestling, or at least reckoning with Yaeger's terms and categories for years to come. Dirt and Desire gets underway, for instance, with a complete overhaul of perhaps the tiredest truism in Southern studies, the vaunted "sense of place." Where critics before her (ironically aided and abetted by Eudora Welty's famous essay on the subject) have found in place an organic source of order and sensory, concreteness that satisfyingly grounds regional identity and community, Yaeger finds something considerably more volatile and vertiginous in the writings of Southern women: nightmare landscapes that swallow up bodies in "reverse autochthony," as in Welty's own "Moon Lake" (pp. 15-18); places that become "crypts," sites of "occluded sadness" where trauma and loss are crystallized and commemorated (pp. 18-20); other spaces haunted by "white detritus," atmospheric but uncanny traces of whiteness--the cotton lint of Welty's Delta Wedding, the flour dust of Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, the frost of McCullers's Member of the Wedding, the New York snowstorm of Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby--that hint at pollution, signaling pervasive anxiety and doubt about white privilege (pp. 20-22); and places left barren or scarred by the anything-but-organic geographies of segregation (pp. 22-24). As Yaeger demonstrates, Southern women writers have long recognized place as a "ground" made fertile by the bodies of all-too-human "figures," and pastoral as a phenomenon that "always happens at someone's expense" (p. 98).

Closely related to this insight is Yaeger's marvelous concept of the throwaway. At a time when Southernists are finally beginning to tap the theoretical work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Julia Kristeva and Mary Douglas for its insights into the role played by transgression, abjection, and pollution in defining and organizing social identity, social ritual, and social space, along comes Yaeger to propose an even more radical figure for social marginality within the South's endemic "culture of neglect" (p. 69). Yaeger does not discount the visceral pleasures and risks associated with pollution or its "double function" in producing and disrupting social classifications (pp. 264-265); indeed, she devotes the final pages of Dirt and Desire to a close, nuanced analysis of the "exuberant, hyperbolic, and sensuous obsession with dirt" (p. 260) in works by Southern women, with special attention to Hurston's Janie as perhaps the supreme avatar of subversive dirt-play in the Southern canon (pp. 268-275). In the idea of the throwaway, however, Yaeger captures the devastating predicament of Southern men, women, and children whose bodies and behavior fall outside the dichotomy of "clean" and "dirty" and thus lack the social visibility and intelligibility offered by either term. To Stallybrass and White's famous model of the transgressive "low-Other" as "socially peripheral" yet "symbolically central" to bourgeois society, Yaeger adds a still lower class that is "neither symbolically nor socially central" (p. 69), that inspires only indifference and neglect. Carrying neither the taboo charge of filth nor the easy privileges of purity, Southern throwaways occupy a space beyond the abject and indeed "outside structure altogether" (p. 67), where they can simply be used and discarded, since, in Yaeger's bitter words, their "bodily harm does not matter enough to be registered or repressed" (p. 68). Yaeger finds these throwaways everywhere in Southern women's writing, often accompanied by the rags and rubbish that symbolize their plight: Sethe in Morrison's Beloved, Sarah in Caroline Gordon's "The Long Day," the slave family scattered to the winds in Chopin's "La Belle Zoroaide," the African-American servants whose subjectivity fades into mere ambience in Welty's Delta Wedding, the discarded corpse of Emmett Till in Audre Lorde's poem "Afterimages" (see especially pp. 68-87). Most of these throwaways are black. Many are never even named. But in striving "to create a history for these disposable bodies" (p. 74), Southern women's writing seeks to "resurrect the possibility of literary mourning" for them (p. 84), bridging "the gap between what is articulable and what has been lived" (p. 74).

Over and over in Dirt and Desire, Yaeger contests received critical wisdom about the South and its writing with new models and schemes. She complicates our understanding of segregation, for instance, by calling attention to moments when the color line is inscribed upon Southern bodies rather than between them, creating eerie hybrids whose monstrosity dramatizes the routine distortions at work under Jim Crow (see especially pp. 30-32, 150-152, 172-175), and by tracing the fate of "crossover objects" (including proper names) that move back and forth between black and white users, black and white spaces, black and white economies, acquiring new and often contentious meanings along the way (pp. 189-217). She charts the repressions and misrecognitions that shore up a dominant Southern epistemology of nostalgia and self-absorption, drawing on Christopher Bollas's object-relations model of "the unthought known" to evoke the everyday habits of nonconceptualization that allow white Southerners to turn thought itself into "an act of refusal" (p. 94), while extending recognition to the lost or occluded or unofficial epistemologies that "the" mind of the South cannot allow itself to think, "the myriad information systems (some known to men and women of color, some to white women, some to children and underclass white men) that have been subjugated or surrogated to so-called higher ways of knowing" (p. 95). Noting the South's seeming obsession with miniaturizing and infantilizing its women, especially its white "ladies," she counters with a riotous chapter on Southern gargantuas in O'Connor, Porter, McCullers, Walker, Hurston, Morrison, and Welty, focusing with particular brilliance on the character of Miss Eckhart in "June Recital" (pp. 121-126) and the unruly poor-white family that rattles the young narrator of "A Memory" (pp. 130-139). She also rescues the shopworn category of the grotesque from its long slide into decadence and quirkiness, demonstrating its extraordinary semantic and formal range: as a "semiotic switchboard" that helps "mov[e] background information into the foreground," ground into figure (p. 25); as a "figure for the literal," "a way of reproducing official terrorism that is both surrealistic and all too real" (p. 28); as a black trope for "the horror of whiteness" or a white trope for "the horror of being white" in a world of race privileges grounded in extraordinary violence (pp. 29-30); and as a reactionary strategy for making social change look monstrous, hideous and unthinkable (pp. 26-27).

For this archive alone Dirt and Desire would be an extremely valuable book. The Southern world mapped in its pages is messy, loud, fluid, excessive, dangerous, exhilarating, and thoroughly against the grain of the official narrative of Southern literary studies, which Yaeger, tongue firmly in cheek, calls the Dixie Limited. But this book has many other merits as well. It expands the conceptual range of Southern women's writing to include the work of Grace Paley, Lucille Clifton, Rim Dove, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Sherley Ann Williams, Audre Lorde, and other writers who hail from outside the region but have been drawn to it as a problematic, irritant, or legacy. It makes room in its alternative canon for the work of male writers such as Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, James Agee, and Charles Ball, even managing to achieve a wary detente of sorts with the Dixie Limited himself, who comes under fire often in these pages (of which more below) but whose "Dry September" is also cited for its vivid account of the numbingly repetitive discourse of racial terror that Yaeger calls "stutterance" or "the automaton of the law" (pp. 168-169). Yaeger also draws to beautiful and powerful effect on Susan Tucker's oral histories of segregation-era Southern domestics and their employers, on Alan Lomax's magisterial account of Delta blues culture and the laboring men and women who created it, on an angry letter from a black sharecropper to the governor of North Carolina cited in Eric Foner's huge history of Reconstruction, and on other "nonliterary" materials that prove just as deeply "invested in thinking about the South" as highbrow stories, novels, or memoirs.

Dirt and Desire is also unprecedented in the consistency and intimacy with which it brings black and white women writers together over the question(s) of the South(s). This may well be the book's signal achievement. Building on the important insights of Thadious Davis in her 1988 essay, "Expanding the Limits: The Intersection of Race and Region," Yaeger maps lines of affiliation and tension running between black and white women writers that dramatically enrich our understanding of both groups and of the white male order (both social and literary) that they jointly contest and critique. The presence of Hurston, Walker, Morrison, Clifton, Dove, Naylor, Lorde, Williams, and Tucker's African domestics, along with Linda Brent, Nella Larsen, Juanita Harrison, Margaret Walker, Sarah E. Wright, and others, irrevocably alters the landscape of Southern literary studies, adding tremendous weight, intensity, and detail to Yaeger's observations on the grotesque and the gargantuan, the crossover and the throwaway, the unthought and the unseen, but also forcing her to scrutinize these categories for racially inflected differences of strategy, perspective, and emphasis.

Yaeger's alertness to such distinctions produces some of the most incisive and thought-provoking observations in her book. She writes, for instance, that while white authors such as O'Connor, McCullers, and Welty "deploy giant white women to fend off the fragrance of the shrinking magnolia, for black women, gigantism--the myth of expansive size or strength--can carry the sting of oppression" (p. 141). Indeed, black domestics were routinely asked to assume huge physical and emotional burdens by white employers who envisioned them as gigantic, strong and indefatigable. "When black women are abused in this way," Yaeger argues, "underpaid and overworked in order to augment white women's imagined physical powerlessness, the black gargantua can become a cipher for anonymity, for the erasure of black subjectivity." In her chapter on the throwaway, she notes that black and white writers both use the rag as a figure for racial oppression and neglect, but in different ways: where Gordon and Chopin, for instance, write rag imagery into powerful concluding scenes to suggest the dead-end of racial trauma, Hurston, Walker, Morrison, and other black writers "position rags ... close to their novels' beginnings," opening their texts "with the revelation of soul murder and then deepen[ing] this insight or work[ing] toward emancipation" (p. 83).

Crossover objects also behave differently in white and black women's writing. In the former, they repeatedly ground sentimental fantasies of African-American desire for white-owned things as a desire for, and hence a valorization of, whiteness itself (pp. 190-202). Black texts such as Hurston's "Gilded Six-Bits," Williams's Dessa Rose, Richard Wright's "Silt," Morrison's Beloved, and Clifton's "generations: a memoir," however, recontextualize the black desire to own within an ideology of possessive individualism, as an urgent need to demonstrate self-ownership within an "object-poor" Southern world that has historically denied African Americans access to either mode of ownership (pp. 202-217). Black writers are also more likely than their white counterparts to draw attention to crossover objects that have been appropriated (or stolen outright) from black Southerners by whites, debunking the white racial fantasy that white-owned things are the only desirable objects in the Southern economy; to stress the burdens and risks for African Americans of taking care of white people's things; and to depict the urgent search for things that black Southerners can genuinely call their own, objects unmediated and untainted by whiteness (p. 202).

Yaeger is equally illuminating on the epistemological issues that differentiate and sometimes divide white and black writers. She offers the useful reminder, for instance, that among the occluded systems of knowledge reclaimed by Southern women's writing are lost African epistemologies whose recovery proves especially crucial to black writers such as Clifton (pp. 144-145). She also draws persuasively on fiction by Gaines and Richard Wright to posit an "absolute knowledge" and "absolute unknowing" that supplement and complicate her account of what Southern whites know but refuse to think. In moments of racial crisis, as the grip of white supremacy reasserts itself, those unlucky enough to be caught in its clutches find that events proceed according to an ironbound script whose outcome "cannot be unthought or unknown" (p. 109; emphasis added). In such circumstances, everyone knows that violence is inevitable, and everyone knows the equally inevitable trajectory of that violence. Wright's stories in Uncle Tom's Children and Gaines's novel A Lesson Before Dying record the sense of absolute powerlessness that accompanies this absolute knowledge, rendering thinking itself "a terrible labor" and tempting black characters especially to "sink out of thought" into a condition of absolute unknowing, where fantasy or sheer exhaustion offers temporary but insufficient distraction from "a world laced with too many wrong answers" (p. 110). Throughout Dirt and Desire, Yaeger understands that the coalition of writers she has assembled cannot and must not be assigned a monolithic oppositional voice, that these writers are often in noisy debate with each other as well as with the culture around them.

Another thing to admire about this book is its resourceful and independent-minded engagement with theory. Dirt and Desire makes refreshing use of Susan Stewart's work on the miniature and the gigantic, Avery Gordon's model of the sociological as well as psychological dimensions of the uncanny, Bryan Turner's typology of social systems that regulate and coordinate bodies, Roland Barthes's concept of the "punctum," Theodor Adorno's reflections on art and historicity. James Clifford's account of surrealism, and, as already discussed, Bollas's fascinating category of the unthought known. But theory is never simply a source of received wisdom for Yaeger. Far more typical are those moments when she calls on theory in order to tweak it, take issue with it, put it in crisis--to call attention to what it can't say about Southern women's writing as well as what it can. Indeed, the complexity and strangeness that Yaeger finds in this writing continually exceed the formulations of theory. Take for example the question of crossover objects. For Yaeger, neither Foucault's account of the discursive status of objects, Marx's concept of the commodity as a mystification of labor relations, Arendt's competing notion that objects stabilize and substantiate human existence and identity, nor Freud's model of objects as the "language" in which unconscious desires and fears take on material form can ultimately capture the variety, density, and velocity of object relations in the South (pp. 191-192, 207-210). Likewise, for Yaeger the intricacies of the Southern grotesque cannot be exhausted by Bakhtin's comic portrait of the grotesque body as a "site of cultural renewal" (p. 221) or by Zizek's account of the wounded body as host to a traumatic irruption of the real that remains outside symbolization (pp. 228-230). And we have already seen how her model of the throwaway tests the limits of Douglas's work on pollution and Stallybrass and White's work on transgression. Readers will be hard-pressed to find a work of Southern literary criticism that applies theoretical insights less formulaically or reverently than Dirt and Desire.

They will be equally hard-pressed to find a more brilliant, passionate argument for the historicity of Southern women's writing. Yaeger rails against monumentalizing critics who relegate women writers to the realm of the trivial, the minor, the private and everyday, as if this realm were somehow outside or beneath history rather than, as Yaeger argues, pervaded by it: The pressures connecting everyday life with large-scale economies suggest another register for negotiating a traditional separation of "history" from everyday truths. Everything--especially the ambitions sweep of politics and history--has already invaded the trivial world and helped to shape it. At the same time, while this micro level supports and replenishes the power structure, it is also a source of social change, of a thousand daily resistances. We need to reenvision, from within the confines and rebellions of this "lower" Southern world, the eccentric work that women's writing performs on behalf of the dailiness of Southern history. (p. 154)

Them's fighting words, a rallying cry for advocates of women's literature in the South and elsewhere, and Yaeger makes good on them by documenting, with exceptional sensitivity, the thick historical texture of the "small angry dramas" (p. 139) and "subsemantic" echoes that ripple through a Southern world of "the nonepic everyday." In Delta Wedding, for example, the delicate tremble and throb of a china cup signals its participation in the convulsive arrangements and "vibrations" of Southern labor and capital (pp. 98-99). The crazy kitchenscape of The Member of the Wedding introduces a "fantasmatic history" (p. 159) in which Big Events like black migration, world war, and the struggle for black voting rights filter down into the domestic, where they are registered in the hard-won local knowledge of Berenice and in the bizarre murals of Frankie and John Henry. Far from "trivial," then, kitchen space functions explicitly in McCullers as a camera obscura, whose walls offer topsy-turvy projections of world historical figures and forces. And then there are the railroad scenes of Jonah's Gourd Vine, which document the social and economic history of African Americans in the South as well as the more commonly noted features of their expressive culture (pp. 47-48); whether riding the rails or lining them, Hurston's John Pearson is thoroughly imbricated in "the ambitious sweep" of Southern politics and history.

In a related argument, Dirt and Desire faults Faulkner and Faulkner studies for a strong misreading of Southern racial history that stresses gothic "mystifications of oedipal angst and miscegenation" over "the ways in which racial knowledge functions in the everyday" (p. 97). Like incest, race in Faulkner tends to be a family matter, and this emphasis on interracial sexuality and kinship creates an atmosphere of perpetual emergency and horror, "making race-mixing the only game in town, the epic, underlying structure driving the whiteness of the American dream." For Yaeger, by contrast, such tragedies of interracial filiation literally pale in comparison to the thousand daily dramas of interracial affiliation that play out in Southern workplaces and homes: "To think about the blood ties created and ignored in acts of transracial sexuality creates fiction that is romantic, sexy, dramatic, and recognizably patriarchal and tragic. But how do we think about the non-consanguineal bonds created and ignored by the conditions of southern labor?" Yaeger argues that women writers have been especially alert to these unmiscegenated intimacies between black and white Southerners, nowhere more so than in their numerous tales of African-American domestic workers and their white employers. Julia and Cornelia in Can't Quit You, Baby., Estella and Anna in Douglas's "On the Lake," Nannie and Sophia Jane in "The Old Order," Juba and Virgie in "The Wanderers," Till and Sapphira in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Rose and Rufel in Dessa Rose, Sofia and Eleanor Jane in The Color Purple, Mammy and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, Berenice and Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, and the black and white protagonists of Tucker's Telling Memories Among Southern Women--the list goes on and on. These stories bear witness to the "semisurrogate families" created by the "white purchase" or "appropriation of maternal labor" from black women, and to the misunderstandings and masquerades, the daily thefts and soul-killing indignities, that characterized these "extended nonkin" arrangements, giving them their "unmitigated complexity" (p. 188). For women writers, then, Southern race relations look "less like an Eleusinian mystery and more like a repetitive, everyday terror--a set of practices so incessantly, so boringly enacted within the everyday that they seem to be hiding in plain sight" (p. 99).

Dirt and Desire's version of Southern microhistory is illuminating and compelling, and as a card-carrying member of the Faulkner studies mafia, I am persuaded to own up to my share of the blame for anointing a mythology of racial melodrama as the dominant narrative of Southern history. But the idolater in me must confess that when Yaeger goes after Mister Bill himself, I get a little uncomfortable, maybe even a little defensive. Yes, we critics, and even some historians, have taken the miscegenation metaphor and run with it. But that metaphor is not the only imaginative tool Faulkner gave us for thinking about the meaning of race in Southern history and society. In The Sound and the Fury, for instance, his first mature attempt to grapple with the subject of Southern race relations, he focuses on an entire family of black caregivers and domestic workers whose "non-consanguineal" relationship to their white employers is characterized by the same banal abuses and betrayals that Yaeger finds documented in Southern women's writing. In the white Compsons and the black Gibsons--Roskus, Versh, Frony, T.P., Luster, and especially Dilsey--Faulkner has given us a "semisurrogate family" if ever there was one, an extended nonkin grouping that revolves around the performance or evasion or purchase--at severe discount--of domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning, hauling firewood, and supervising children. While in the figure of Clytie Sutpen domestic ironies and intimacies are compounded by blood ties--the slave as servant and sister--they remain thoroughly unmiscegenated in Dilsey, inscribed on her collapsing yet indomitable body in the famous opening scene of section four and recorded in practically every speech, gesture, or movement she makes in the novel. I am suggesting, then, that when it comes to race relations in Yoknapatawpha, Eleusinian mysteries aren't the only game in town--and that a critical study with room in its Southern countercanon for Wright, Gaines, and Chesnutt might have found more of a niche for Faulkner as an honorary sister and foremother.

I'm also a little puzzled by Yaeger's choice of 1930 as the ostensible starting point of her study. The year, as she recognizes, "has remained a magical date for studies of modern southern literature" (p. 44), allowing conservative critics to position Faulkner and the Nashville Agrarians as the seminal figures behind twentieth-century literary and intellectual production in the South (pp. 44-45). Why then begin Dirt and Desire "just as magically" with this date? One answer might be that Yaeger is attempting to "mimic" Southern literary history in much the same way that Luce Irigaray mimics philosophy in Speculum of the Other Woman and the essays in This Sex Which Is Not One, by reproducing its central assumptions but with a parodic twist that simultaneously exposes and subverts them. Appearing to embrace the annus mirabilis of 1930, for instance, allows Yaeger to develop alternative histories that challenge the reigning critical account of that hallowed year as a time when some intelligent white guys in the South suddenly started taking an ironic backward glance at the Civil War and the Southern traditions that gave rise to it (and them). Her point is that Southerners glancing around rather than behind them in the thirties would have seen much, much more--a renaissance of African-American art and letters already well underway, plus the Great Migration, the Depression and New Deal, and "an incredible onslaught" of published fiction by Southern women--and that these "tidal events changing the face of the South" should also be recognized as informing elements of "a southern literary lexicon" (see especially pp. 44-52). As with literary theory, then, Yaeger cites literary history in order to complicate and surpass it.

Still, Dirt and Desire does not in fact begin with the year 1930, which leads one to wonder why its subtitle announces that it does. It would be more accurate to say that the book begins with Yaeger's vivid awareness of "a powerful century and a half of women's writing coining out of the South" (p. 253) and proceeds to cite and develop "an unbroken stream of extraordinary writing ... stretching from the Civil War to the present." Kate Chopin, for instance, figures prominently in Dirt and Desire. So do Linda Brent and Grace King. So, to a lesser degree, do Sarah Barnwell Elliott, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, fugitive slaves, and a number of other figures who considerably predate the thirties. Whatever its strategic or "mimetic" value, then, the date of 1930 ultimately does a disservice to Yaeger's book, misrepresenting both the scale and the significance of the literary history she reconstructs in its pages.

It is probably unfair to fault a book as expansive as this one for not doing even more, but there are a number of Southern women writers whom I was surprised not to encounter more often in Dirt and Desire. Harriet Arnow, whose gargantuan novel The Dollmaker revolves around a heroine as raw and gigantic and irreducible to mere ladyhood as any in Southern writing, comes immediately to mind; she sneaks into a single footnote but is otherwise unheard from here. So are Zelda Fitzgerald, Doris Betts, and Shirley Ann Grau. And so for the most part is another group of writers whose achievement is perhaps of a different order: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, Josephine Humphreys, Ellen Glasgow, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Spencer, Evelyn Scott, Lillian Hellman, Grace and Katharine Lumpkin. These figures seem to slip under Yaeger's radar, in part because, as she herself recognizes, "they are rarely interested in [her] not-so-secret obsession, the southern grotesque" (p. 259). They are for the most part realists rather than surrealists; their relatively accessible, straightforward, nonhallucinatory methods of storytelling thus pose a challenge to a critical archive that emphasizes violence, distortion, uncanniness, excess, tension, and extreme formal innovation. Yet are these writers any more acquiescent to the Southern status quo, any less invested in resistance and critique, than, say, O'Connor, McCullers, Walker, Morrison, or Lillian Smith? All in all, probably not. This suggests that the unbroken stream of Southern women's writing might be thought of in terms of different forks or traditions, distinguished not so much by race as by something like attitude or temperament or what Yaeger sometimes calls "volume." One fork, Yaeger's fork, is a cataract straight out of Deliverance, all torrent and thunder, the ride of a lifetime; in the other, the bends are gentler, the ride calmer, the waters limpid. It will fall to critics working in the aftermath of Dirt and Desire--including, I hope, Yaeger herself--to expand her archive to accommodate this other, less obstreperous female tradition.

A final aspect of this book that intrigues and provokes me is its curiously ambivalent stance toward the act of reading. On one hand, Dirt and Desire exhibits extraordinary faith in the power of reading, in the effects produced and responses elicited by the textual distortions of which Yaeger is so fond. We read of readers being seized (p. 234), pierced (p. 160), stung (p. 161), impaled (p. 182), repelled (p. 228), and dazzled (p. 237) by grotesque or fantasmatic effects, of other readers who become "stuck" in the bodies of literary characters (p. 224), of images that "make disintegrating marks on the reader's flesh" (p. 228), and of texts that arrest, fixate, and disturb readerly bodies, urging them to "open up" to the repellant truths of Southern history and ideology (p. 222). Nor does Yaeger seem to mean any of this in a merely figurative sense. For her, the grotesque in particular takes on the function of testimony in Southern women's writing, forging an immediate, material link between the textual world of characters and other literary representations and the social world that encompasses the bodies and experiences of real readers. The point bears repeating--the act of reading reaches the reader's body as well as her mind--and Dirt and Desire makes it repeatedly: the Southern grotesque "make[s] history somatic," offering readers "the chance to experience history--that is, events that have happened to others--within the domain of one's own body, with the perceptual power that is casually reserved for one's own body" (p. 247; see also pp. 227, 235, 238, 249). The reader thus becomes not just a witness to Southern trauma but "a co-owner or co-participant in" it (p. 239).

This account of readerly bedazzlement and wounding is itself dazzling, but Dirt and Desire is also marked, from its earliest pages, by tremendous anxiety about reading. For Yaeger can never quite forget that the writers whom she celebrates throughout her book for their ability to seize, mark, and transport readers have also been habitually, even willfully misread for decades, and not just by Book-of-the-Month-Club types but by many of the same professional critics and scholars whose work helped vault Southern writing into canonical prominence in American universities and publishing houses. She bemoans, for instance, the way that The Member of the Wedding has been "tamed by its readers" (p. 167), reduced to "an economical way to learn about the pangs of growing up," or the way that Welty's work has been similarly sweetened, gentrified, and robbed of its historicity by readers who ought to know better. (Indeed, Yaeger's strident undomestication of Welty is an especially significant achievement.) Were it not for such systematic misrecognitions, of course, Dirt and Desire would not need to exist. But Yaeger goes farther, calling attention to the frequency with which Southern women writers themselves document the pervasive and destructive extent of misreading in Southern life and society. The book opens on a horrifying primal scene of misreading from Can't Quit You, Baby, an apocryphal tale in which a young skier who believes herself caught in barbed wire turns out to be entangled in a deadly, writhing ball of water moccasins (p. 3). It closes on another scene of misrecognition and death from Porter's story "The Fig Tree," as another young Southerner, Miranda Rhea, mistakes the evening flutings of tree frogs for the weeping of a prematurely buried chick--though Yaeger will mine this misreading for its own subterranean insights into a landscape pervaded by loss and melancholy (pp. 276-277). In between, Yaeger exposes the moral failures that attend misreading in Chopin's "La Belle Zoroaide," where a white mistress completely misunderstands the meaning of her servant's bitter tale of throwaway bodies and fractured families on the plantation (pp. 74, 87). She also expresses concern that grotesque effects may backfire on authors and readers, that the "obtuseness and decadence" of the grotesque could wind up serving "reprehensible political ends" (pp. 24-25) by eliciting among readers either sentimental pathos, "shocked recoil," or an unjustified "sense of relief that `this is not my body'" (p. 248). Dirt and Desire never quite shakes this nervousness about the limits and hazards of reading.

And this nervousness is certainly understandable. No less a figure than Richard Wright, for instance, whose Uncle Tom's Children is cited approvingly by Yaeger throughout Dirt and Desire, came to renounce the grotesque textual effects of that collection because they led readers to unintended and entirely inappropriate responses. In Wright's own words, "I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about." The problem, that is, was not that his book had failed to make history somatic but that it had made history somatic in precisely the wrong way, that in reaching readers' bodies it had moved them only to the shallow, sentimental solace of tears rather than the more difficult, radical form of compassion that comes from sharing intimately in another's trauma. Wright's realization that he would never succeed in conveying the trauma of black American lives by sentimental appeals to the power of readerly sympathy, a realization that led him to create the distinctly unsentimental, unsympathetic figure of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, places him closer to trauma theorists such as Elaine Scarry and Kali Tal, who stress the ultimate incommunicability of bodily suffering, its terrible privacy and imperviousness to linguistic representation, than to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, whose more affirmative models of trauma, testimony, and witness provide the theoretical backbone of Yaeger's argument about the textual force of the Southern grotesque. Even when the grotesque succeeds in "provoking bodily impressions" in readers (p. 228), then, there can be no guarantee that the response to these impressions will be progressive, will effect meaningful, desirable change in a social realm racked by trauma--or will effect change of any kind rather than mere dispassion or denial.

In introducing these complications I do not mean to sound dismissive or, worse, hopeless. For certainly there are other writers in Yaeger's study who wagered a great deal on the social efficacy of writing and reading, sometimes at quite specific moments in their careers. Lillian Smith, for instance, turned explicitly away from camp directing, which had allowed her to intervene directly in the social praxis of privileged white girls from the South, to full-time writing in 1949, in part because she believed that her books would reach a larger audience, and effect larger changes, than her campers would. Eudora Welty turned from photography, and Carson McCullers from the piano, to fiction at nearly the same time in the thirties, each, no doubt, having imbibed from the social ferment of that decade the belief that their writings would have a meaningful impact on the world around them. Equally significant is Alice Walker's turn in the late sixties from civil-rights activism to a career in letters, a turn she later explored through her character Meridian, who remains committed to the transformation of self and society even as the specific medium of that commitment changes from political theater to interior revolution and personal expression.

If Southern writers can thus be found on both sides of this fundamental question, the question itself remains: how do we get from literary characters and texts, through readers, to the realm of everyday practice, from representations of Southern bodies to the reader's body and world? Through what textual processes, or along what cognitive pathways, do we "cross over" from reading about a place, a society, a condition, to inhabiting and influencing one--from the eros of encountering and consuming a counterfactual world to the ethos of recognizing that world, in some new and visceral way, as our own, and acting on that recognition in our own? As Yaeger herself asks, "What really happens to readers of southern fictions as they continue to encounter ... page after page of characters who are bizarre, bloated, inundated with wounds" (p. 229)? By which she means, at bottom: What is the relationship between the act of reading and social change in the South? Reading Dirt and Desire has made it clear to me that students of Southern literature and history need a better account of this relationship.

Though theory is clearly one of Yaeger's strong suits, such an account need not be theoretical. In fact, I wonder whether testimony might not prove to be a more instructive source of insight into the transformative power of reading. Southern women's writing, of course, abounds in scenes that record a sudden awakening to social or racial injustice, an awakening that in turn kindles a lasting commitment to social change. Such texts, as Fred Hobson has lately recognized, resemble conversion narratives, but they rarely hinge on acts of reading. For Lillian Smith, the pivotal experence came with the arrival in her own youthful home of a mixed-race child who stymied the efforts of local whites to police the color line. For Katharine du Pre Lumpkin it came in young adulthood, with the invitation to an interracial tea in New York. And for Mab Segrest it came as she peered from under a bush at the twelve black children and two hundred state troopers who had come to integrate her central Alabama high school. I would argue that what is most significant about these scenes from Killers of the Dream, The Making of a Southerner, and My Mama's Dead Squirrel has less to do with their ability to mark readers directly with the hard facts of Southern life, as Yaeger would have it, than with the shattering empathy they record as it emerged in the writer-participants themselves. It wasn't reading about injustice or trauma that transformed these women, it was seeing and hearing and feeling it firsthand.

So we need to know more about Southerners who were shattered and transfigured, brought to awareness and commitment and engagement, by what they read, and we need to know what they read. Was it Yaeger's kind of writing, loud and twisted and strange? Did it reach their bodies, leaving throats dry, pulses racing, nerves agitated, muscles knotted and aching? How much of it was authored by women? Where are these testimonies to be found?

And why do I get the sense that we might start with Yaeger herself?. Dirt and Desire carries on a running flirtation, never completely consummated, with memoir. Opening the book to page one, we read, "This is a book about the South: a book driven by the pleasures and costs of my family's own southern past." An offhand reference to childhood roots in "northern Florida, northern Georgia" invites comparison, perhaps intentionally, with one of the modern South's great memoirists, Lillian Smith. And Yaeger continues in this autobiographical vein: [T]he chapters that follow flow inevitably from my own private quarrels with the South--from a sense that I was gargantuan or oversized in a world of petite and belle-like little girls; from a sense that my own right to testify, to speak out against familial, racial, and religious injustice was censored in school and at home; from a sense, as well, that I did not want to testify, or could not, or did not know how; from memories of the bizarre pressures of being a middle-class southern white girl caught [shades of Lillian Smith again] between my father's southern Methodism and the world of my mother's hymn-singing, Bible-swinging Baptist past and of being someone destined by the age of five for my family's peculiar Scylla and Charybdis--the fatal need to choose between the Tri Delts, my Aunt Mary Louise's sorority, or Kappa Delta, my mother's--and clearly unfit, in my anger and awkwardness, for either institution. My identifies and sympathies, then, are all with the southern grotesque, having been one and known more than a few. (p. 2)

In this way Yaeger signals that her own literary foremothers include figures like Smith and Segrest and Lumpkin, who turn life-writing into a mode of vigorous social critique, alongside scholars like Hazel Carby or Anne Goodwyn Jones. I am suggesting, then, that somewhere deep down in Yaeger's energetic and highly personal brand of literary criticism there may be a memoir trying to get out, a memoir that, given Yaeger's convictions about the social efficacy of reading and her own obvious sense of adventure, empathy, and pleasure as a reader, might have a powerful story to tell about literature and transformation in the South. This is my roundabout way of saying that if Yaeger were ever to write such a memoir, I would read it with interest. Until then we have this rich book. Dirt and Desire may be its own best evidence for the better world Yaeger sometimes dreams of in its pages, one in which Southern women can be "noisy and grand" (p. 126).