SOURCE: Yaeger, Patricia. “Beyond the Hummingbird: Southern Women Writers and the Southern Gargantua.” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, pp. 287-318. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

In the following essay, Yaeger discusses Southern women writers' frequent use of physically grotesque characters in their works and emphasizes the latter's political role in “mapping an entire region's social and psychic neuroses.”

Giant Bodies

This is an essay with an agenda. I want to describe the political effects of the grotesque in southern women's fiction since it is my conviction that this fiction has a politics: a politics that can be read through southern women writers' amazing inventiveness—their daunting grotesques, their mingling of dirt and desire, their tragic invention of “old” southern children.

Despite its beauty and innovation, writing by southern women has for many years taken a back seat...