From numerous interviews, we know that William Gay was very interested in the relationship between the mid-twentieth-century Tennessee of his childhood, which he perceived as culturally distinct from the nation at large, and the socioeconomic homogenization of postwar America. This thesis analyzes two pieces of Gay’s fiction in which “local” characters and places interact with signifiers of globalization, both spatial and social. Where some critics have claimed that his representation of environmental damage and settler displacement engages contemporary ecocritical dialogues of the Global South—or that his ostensibly “Rough South” aesthetic interacts progressively with recent trends in Southern criticism—I suggest that his work demonstrates a level of recalcitrance to both signifiers of global development and to the backwoods individualism that has long stood as its binary opposition. Two distinct monstrosities pervade the Harrikin of his third novel, Twilight (2006): the exploitative and cosmopolitan undertaker Fenton Breece, and the retributive local marauder Granville Sutter. Where the local characters object to the grotesque and Gothic globality of Breece’s mansion and his exploitation of their bodies, they also demonstrate a fear of Sutter’s death drive toward the sociospatial isolation of a subterranean mineshaft. “The Paperhanger” is Gay’s only substantive engagement with immigrants in the rural South, and I show how they become objects rather than subjects of the backwoods violence that festers on the outskirts of Ackerman’s Field. I argue that a fluid dialectic of fear and violence informs Gay’s representation of sociospatial change in the rural South at the mid- and late-twentieth century. His treatment of social disorder as a product of both insular entrenchment and cultural development defamiliarizes the critical binaries of progress and backwardness, the country and the city, and the local and the global.
Graham Richards (Thu,) studied this question.