SOURCE: “Hopeful Grief: The Prospect of a Postmodernist Feminism in Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina,” in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1, Fall, 2000, pp. 122–40.

In the following essay, King explores the postmodern and feminist aspects of Bastard Out of Carolina.

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a lyrical yet fiercely disturbing portrait of a South Carolina family besieged by poverty, violence, and incest. Narrated by young Ruth Anne Boatwright—or Bone as she is called by her family—the novel begins, ordinarily enough, with her birth and early years and quickly focuses on the relationship between Bone and her violent stepfather, Daddy Glen. Glen's abuse of Bone reaches a fever pitch in the eighth chapter. There a young intern, who is treating Bone's second broken clavicle, notices that her coccyx has also been broken. Confronted by the angry doctor, the mother finally admits (if only temporarily) the seriousness...