["The Patriarchal State of Normalcy and the Southern Freak
I have tried these past weeks, in the process of this writing, to explain how I conspired in this entrapment, why the grotesque holds such appeal for me. I think it is because freaks in Southern Gothic literature reflect a process basic to the small-town Southern life I knew. This community was confined by the narrow boundaries of what it felt was permittable or speakable. The sharply drawn perimeters of normalcy created its opposite, the grotesque. If some people must be normal, then some must be different from normal, or freaks. In reality, everyone is a freak because no human can cram her/himself into the narrow space that is the state of normalcy. But all have to pretend that they fit, and those closet freaks choose the most vulnerable among them to punish for their own secret alienation, to bear the burden of strangeness. O'Connor has deep insight into this discrepancy between the narrowness of people's models for experience— encapsulated in Mrs. Hopewell's clichés about "ladies" and "good country people"— and the chaos and mystery of existence that continues to erupt through the clichés.
The town freak (or eccentric, the eccentric being in one's own family, the freak in someone else's) is often sacrosanct, protected because her/his insanity is recognized as necessary to preserve collective sanity (as in "Ballad of the Sad Café," where the town withers into a wasteland when Amelia's vitalizing differentness is destroyed). I have heard from friends studying family therapy that this scapegoating process occurs in families as well as communities, when one member is often chosen to bear the burden of sickness, allowing other members to be well. And if this scapegoating process cuts the freak off from the community, it builds into the community a death wish. People are cut off from each other and from the strange in themselves. As Adrienne Rich explains, "The unspoken.... becomes the unspeakable." Wholeness of self or community becomes impossible. Deformity, partiality, grotesqueness perpetuate themselves.
These community demands for normalcy are particularly strong around matters of female sexuality— hence the prevalence of the female grotesque in these fictions and hence my own early sense of "lesbian separation" (to coin a phrase).
Which brings me to the major question: Why do people do this to each other and to themselves? Why these narrow boundaries in the first place? I wish I knew the whole answer. I know that it is NOT merely a Southern problem, although we white Southerners— as American Family Freaks, racist and immoral— have acted out our pathology at times with great zest.
To begin to answer: I know that this destructive process in the South is intimately related to racism. It is the legacy of slavery to a people who could not afford to do the right thing so that they could not afford to listen to their consciences and consequently cut themselves off from the better parts of themselves. Before I can enslave someone, I must first see him/her as less than human, unlike me. Other. Lillian Smith, activist and author, offers profound insight into white racist psychology, with imagery like mine of walls and boundaries:
Our emotions are blunted where Negroes are concerned. It is though we had segregated an area in our minds, marked it 'colored' and refused our feelings entrance to it... But when we reserve this humanity of ours, this precious quality of love, of tenderness, and of imaginative identification, for only people of our own skin color (or of our family, our own class, or friends) we have split our lives in a way shockingly akin to those sick people whom we call schizophrenics. And we develop— as we whites have developed toward Negroes— a personality picture strongly like theirs of blunted emotions, delusions of persecution, feelings of 'aloneness', extreme irritability when efforts are made to change our white ways... We develop a desire to shut ourselves off not only from the Negro by segregation, but also from all science, all influences that are disturbing to the picture we have made of ourselves and of our 'persecutors.'
This walling off of parts of the self— the segregated heart— creates the grotesque."]
Mab Segrest, My Mama's Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Life, Firebrand Books, 1985
