SOURCE: “Talking Trash, Talking Back: Resistance to Stereotypes in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina,” in Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 26, Nos. 1–2, Spring–Summer, 1998, pp. 15–25.

In the following essay, McDonald explores the literary techniques that Allison employs in Bastard Out of Carolina to give the reader a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of her characters.

They were of a kind not safely to be described in an account claiming to be unimaginative or untrustworthy, for they had too much and too outlandish beauty not to be legendary. Since, however, they existed quite irrelevant to myth, it will be necessary to tell a little of them.

—James Agee, referring in his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to poor-white, southern tenant farmers during the Depression

I read Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina for the first time while living in the South, working with young children at a day care...