"Lazy Jack": Coding and Contextualizing Resistance in Appalachian Women's Narratives
1999
The female characters in most American Jack tales portray
ancillary roles and seldom display strong character or initiative. But
Appalachian storyteller Beverly Carter-Sexton develops strong women
characters in all of her Jack tales. In "Lazy Jack," a remarkable
tale involving cannibalism and self-cannibalism, she uses coding and
contextualizing techniques to challenge traditional gender and economic
relationships that she has observed in her native Rockcastle County,
Kentucky. This paper 1) examines the dominant motifs and related versions
of this tale to appreciate the changes Carter-Sexton has brought to her
telling; 2) analyzes the implicit coding strategies of appropriation,
juxtaposition, and incompetence used by Carter-Sexton to subvert male
dominance, and links her coding strategies to those used by other
female storytellers in her family; and 3) explores the metanarrative
and metaperformative techniques she uses to recontextualize the tale.
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