Doubling Back: Finding Bobbie Ann Mason's Present in Her Past

Known for spare prose and "Kmart realism" Bobbie Ann Mason's fiction typically offers minimalist portraits of life in a twentieth-century South, increasingly carpeted by fast food restaurants and discount chains. History has, at least superficially, appeared of little consequence to her modern-day southerners, who ultimately bear more similarity to the homogenized disenchantment of America at large than they do to the aching self-indulgence of classic figures in southern literature: Quentin Compson, Jack Burden, and Binx Bolling, for example. As Robert Brinkmeyer has noted, in Mason's fiction "trends instead of traditions hold sway" ("Finding" 22). Neither of her first two novels or her two short story collections exceeds three hundred pages in length, sketching, sometimes in bare outlines, the psychological terrain of characters who know themselves and their family histories no more intimately than we finally do. If, as Hugh Holman maintains in The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History (1977), "the southerner has always had his imaginative faculties excited by events in time and has found the most profound truths of the present and the future in the interpretation of the past" (1), then Mason would not seem to be much of a southern writer in the traditional understanding of that term. Her characters are more representative, in fact, of what Lewis Lawson sees as the contemporary southerner's impulse to understand herself not as rooted in history but "as a product of present social complexities" (17). Into the midst of these expectations for Mason's fiction comes Feather Crowns (1993), a lengthy historical novel, set in turn-of-the-century Kentucky and filled with startling insights about womanhood and motherhood gleaned from the life lessons of Christie Wheeler, who does what Mason's characters usually do not. She lives an entire life, and speaks from the vantage point of time and distance about the circumstances and events that have shaped her existence. Feather Crowns "surprised me with its plenitude" Alan Davis observed in The Hudson Review (147). In fact, commented David Montrose in the Times Literary Supplement, the novel is "overplenished with detail" (20). Indeed, Feather Crowns appears to cross the boundaries Mason had seemingly established for herself. Yet in many ways, Feather Crowns is an extension backward of the styles and themes that are hallmarks of Mason's fiction. Her preoccupation with the decaying landscape of the South, with the passing of old ways in the face of relentless modernity, and with the subterranean details of human interaction to which words repeatedly fail to give adequate expression returns in the rural lifestyles of the Wheeler family. And their lives are as riddled with the icons of popular culture as is the life of In Country's (1985) Sam Hughes. But unlike other Mason characters, Christie and James Wheeler finally wrench themselves free of the influences of popular culture, offering a resistance to and an awareness of those controlling forces that Mason's modern protagonists and readers seldom exhibit. The Wheelers entrench themselves on the line between centuries, digging in their heels one last time before their descendants are swept away in a twentieth-century media blitz. Mason's fictional retreat into the past becomes, then, a journey that lends her tales and novels of the present added significance, establishing them as part of a thematic continuum that crosses time periods. Emmett's declaration in In Country that the "main thing you learn from history is that you can't learn from history" (226) is his own, not Mason's. Fred Hobson points out that In Country is actually a novel very much concerned with history (15), but history of the recent rather than distant past, history as it shapes the lives of individuals rather than as it transforms entire regions and cultures. In fact, Harriet Pollack places Mason within a tradition of recent southern women writers who "recenter" history by offering "an account of lives lived on the margins of official history and culture--of lives silent in history because, by race, class, or gender, they lacked access to official power and event" (96). …