Edna Earle Ponder is essentially a character type, as are Daniel and Bonnie Dee. Edna Earle is proud, but goodhearted, and she allows Daniel a good deal of freedom to spend money how he will and marry whom he will. And she is a gabber, the prototype of the Southern gossip who loves nothing more than a captive audience with whom she can share the intimate details of her family life. Daniel, too, is a type, simple and sweet, the very type that would draw out a spinster's motherly instincts or become the target of someone's greed. Bonnie Dee and her family are no strangers in southern fiction or in southern films. Ungrammatical, greedy, and clannish, they make a later appearance as Wanda Fay's family in The Optimist's Daughter (1972). They are the source of a great deal of consternation for Edna Earle and a great deal of comedy...