Swampland:Pat Conroy Contest Topic #2: The Significance of Family in Southern Writing

Pat Conroy Contest Topic #2: The Significance of Family in Southern Writing

Posted: Sep 16, 2009

"You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood stick to you" says the barn-burning father Ab Snopes to his ten year old son Sarty shortly before Ab burns yet another barn and Sarty turns his back on his father and runs away into the dark night . (William Faulkner "Barn Burning"). Mark Twain's character Huckleberry Finn spends much of his young life hiding from his vicious and drunken father. Lily, in Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, leaves her home and her abusive father at the age of fourteen.

When I think of the southern novel, I am reminded of the opening lines of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." There is no dearth of unhappy families in Russian literature, but sometimes the southern novel seems to have put the "dys" in dysfuntional.---abusive fathers (see Faulkner, Conroy, Mark Twain); weak fathers or alcoholic fathers or both (again Faulkner, Conroy, Twain, Robert Penn Warren); neurotic, narcissistic, abusive and/or alcoholic mothers (Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Conner May Fowler), cruel and malicious siblings, incest, and madness. The list goes on and on.

This situation becomes all the more complex because families are thrust upon us by fate-- not coincidentally the subject of our first essay topic. We cannot chose our mother and father or our sisters and brothers. Pat Conroy once said that one of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family. His own brutish father was the inspiration for his first novel The Great Santini. “My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.” (Pat Conroy)

Conroy's mother ("I was raised by Scarlett O'Hara") and sister Carol who was treated for severe depression were the motivation for The Prince of Tides. Conroy told an interviewer from USA Today that of his six younger brothers and sisters at least five of them had been suicidal at one time or another and the other two just would not admit it. His sister was treated for severe depression and a younger brother committed suicide at the age of 33 in 1994. (For more about Pat Conroy's life, see the Swampland article Pat Conroy Has Always Been a Favorite Writer of Mine by Michael Buffalo Smith.)

In spite of all this dysfunction in southern literature, there is redemptive humor. Southerners can laugh at themselves and even at their own family situations. My father was a high-functioning alcoholic--a most successful and beloved veterinarian. He was also a hilariously funny man. I can look back and see him as a larger-than-life character with appetites to match which he passed onto at least one of his offspring.

Southerners tend to forgive---or at least many do. And the literature, whether happy or sad, is often redemptive. In Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come To, Jedediah Tewksbury leaves his home in fictional Dugton, Alabama, (where his father died drunk p... off the front of a mule wagon---a story Jed told at every university function for the rest of his life) to become a professor of literature. In the end, he found that he could never be who he was until he accepted where he came from. Thomas Wolfe may have said "you can't go home again," but Warren seems to be saying that you can't go anywhere until you have first come home.

Do southern novels have more dysfunctional families than novels of other types or do southerners just "own up" and admit the love/hate relationship that families tend to foster? How do families both maim and sustain us? Can we ever heal the scars of our family history? Conroy also said that in families there are no crimes past forgiveness. Does forgiving imply that one must become a co-conspirator or an enabler or does it mean that we accept and move on?

Essay Topic for Week 2 of contest: RULES HERE

We want contest essays to expand beyond merely using the works of Pat Conroy in order to explore thoroughly the role of family in all of southern writing. Feel free use the work(s) of the southern writers at large and their fictional or non-fictional characters to explore the theme of family. Share with us your southern literary experiences that might have moved you personally or best captured the essence of family. Again, you need not illustrate your essay from the novels of Pat Conroy. Writers of the South Facebook Group and Swampland celebrate all of southern writing.

Everyone can get further ideas from our own James Calemine and his recently published essay.

Next week we will discuss the significance of relationships that are not familial in southern literature, especially the bonds of friendship. So post your 100 word essay for this week on the wall of Writers of the South Facebook page and then get ready for next week's question.

---Penne J. Laubenthal

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PenneElk says...

Thanks, sis. I loved your post for the Pat Conroy Contest on Writers of the South Facebook page. Thanks for posting it again here for others to read. I hope it will encourage others to enter. GREAT writing. :-)

pegfarlow says...

Thought I'd post my essay for the contest and encourage other's to enter. If I can do this anybody can!!! Your sister, Peggy After two divorces, I read every book on co-dependence, children of alcoholics, and dysfunctional families I could get my hands on. A girlfriend once asked me, "Is there any book in this house I can read that won't make me healthier, more spiritual, or wiser?" I was seriously trying to learn how to survive in a world of chaos. About the same time I watched the film Prince of Tides. I remember to this day the scene where the alcoholic father raged for his food while the children looked on with fear in their eyes. The mother never said a word. She simply continued to prepare his supper. I wanted to kill him and found myself clinching my fists. The mother quietly reached for a can of dog food, opened it, poured it into a skillet, and served him hash. In that one brief scene, I learned more than any self-help book ever taught me!

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Pat Conroy Contest Topic #2: The Significance of Family in Southern Writing

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Pat Conroy Contest Topic #2: The Significance of Family in Southern Writing

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