SOURCE: Fine, Laura. “Going Nowhere Slow: The Post-South World of Bobbie Ann Mason.” Southern Literary Journal 32, no. 1 (fall 1999): 87–97.

[In the following essay, Fine argues that Mason's depiction of the South in her short fiction lacks the traditional values found in the stories of other southern writers such as Flannery O'Connor.]

In his 1930 story “A Rose for Emily” William Faulkner depicts a South in painful transition. The Old South, with its history of slavery, racism, and cruelty masked by a genteel front, battles the forces of the New South, mercantile, unconcerned with beauty. In Flannery O'Connor's stories, the South is peopled by shallow, narrow-minded whites, representatives of both the New and Old South, who assume a superiority based on their race while demonstrating a gaping ignorance of their shortcomings. O'Connor uses her bladelike humor to teach her smug characters important lessons, the ultimate being that the world is ordered by a class and colorblind God. The truth is there and knowable, but the characters are blind until O'Connor teaches them to see. Bobbie Ann Mason, in her 1980s short stories, portrays an entirely different South.

Whether factually accurate or not, a certain idea of the South has passed through the generations of southern literature. The writer Brenda Marie Osbey finds the “quilt” of southern literature threaded together by “religion, a preoccupation with death and loss, remembrance, and a love for the land” (qtd in Humphries and Lowe, 14). Virginia A. Smith sees the “issues of an economically and psychologically bruising military defeat and a defense of and guilt over an elaborately institutionalized system of chattel slavery” as well as “a tradition of story-telling, oral history and a veneration of the genteel act of writing” (4) as forming the standards of southern literature. Perhaps Jack Butler's definition of the canon of southern literature is most salient: “We think of a place; we think of the darkness and splendor of families; we think of a way of talking; we think of the Bible; and we think of black and white locked into a mutual if inharmonious fate” (35).

While Mason references her characters' southern locale and speech, and even their largely dysfunctional families, in Mason's fictional world southern history and all it represents seems irrelevant to her characters' lives. In his review of Mason's Midnight Magic, her new collection of stories selected from her first two volumes, Michael Gorra writes of Mason's characters as living “in a temporary world of Big Macs and Battlestar Galactica.” (7). Indeed, the people of Mason's stories are predominately lower-middle class white heterosexuals who could live in any subdivision or farm in the country. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. suggests that Mason's “focus is less on the Southern experience than on the American, and so for her a Southerner's quest for self-definition means coming to terms with America and not the South” (32), while Fred Hobson sees in Bobbie Ann Mason “a relative lack of southern self-consciousness” (“Canons” 84). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the characters in her stories display a lack of self-consciousness, period, and that Mason's subdivided South stands as a representation of the United States in general.

In Civilization and its Discontents Freud analyzes humanity's need to erect institutions and rules in order to protect people from others: “Hence … the use of methods … to incite people into … aim-inhibited relationships of love … the restriction upon sexual life … and the ideal's commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself—a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man” (66). No matter their failings, splendid and amazing in their scope, the institutions and traditions of southern culture, though justly maligned, established a framework for behavior and attitudes. In Mason's stories, the traditions of religion, the conventions of white heterosexual family life, of masculine and feminine roles, are no longer in any way sustaining. Unlike in O'Connor, no higher power orders the South Mason depicts, and no clear rules or mores remain for governing human social behavior. The only shaping force on characters' lives is popular culture. And though many of her characters are vaguely aware of their unhappiness, the cure-alls offered by popular culture are illusory and ineffective. Representative stories from her two collections, Shiloh, and Other Stories and Love Life, demonstrate Mason's decidedly and, because of her mild-mannered prose and deadpan narrative voice, surprisingly bleak vision of contemporary American society.

Although O'Connor peoples her fictional world with an abundance of religious hypocrites, her vision is distinctly spiritual, and most of her characters assume that a God orders their world. Not so in Mason's fiction. In “The Retreat” the main character, Georgeann, is married to a pastor, but her husband's view of the world is a nearly obsolete one. Not only must he work as a licensed electrician to be able to afford to preach, but his faith in the value of spirituality is one not even his wife can share. As Mason critic G. O. Morphew writes, “religion is not a dominating presence in Georgeann's inner life nor does it play much of a role in the lives of any of Mason's central female characters. For them, religion is just in the landscape, like the corn fields that surround the Kentucky farm houses” (43).

Although Shelby labors at his sermons, he is not able to communicate effectively with his parishioners. When Georgeann types out a sermon he writes on sex education in the schools, she challenges a word, “pucelage.” To her husband's patient explanation that it means “virginity” she retorts, “Why didn't you just say so! Nobody will know what it means” (Shiloh 138). And one snowy day, after he has heard that a church member has been drinking, Shelby delivers a sermon on alcohol abuse to a congregation of three, including an elderly couple and “Miss Addie Stone, the president of the WCTU chapter” (134). The vital role the church once played in southern communities is here comically diminished.

The Love Life stories, “Airwaves” and “Midnight Magic” portray a religion further enervated. In “Airwaves” Jane hears that her brother Joe, who has been in trouble most of his life, is now preaching and even speaking in tongues at the “Foremost Evangelical Assembly” so she goes to his church one Sunday out of curiosity. In the middle of “healing” a child, Joe starts his performance, surprising his sister: “‘Shecky-beck-be-floyt-I-shecky-tibby-libby. Dab-cree-la-croo-la-crow.’ He seems to be trying hard not to say ‘abracadabra’ or any other familiar words. Jane, disappointed, doubts that these words are messages from heaven. Joe seems afraid some repressed obscenity might rush out” (189–190). Ironically, one of the few examples of a Mason character being concertedly self-conscious involves a religious fake intent on not betraying himself. The practice of religion has become one of many revolving jobs for a con man who realizes that if he is sufficiently self-aware he is bound to fool his largely unreflective followers.

Religion is again reduced to nothing more than con artists scamming needy, gullible people in “Midnight Magic” which portrays Steve's girlfriend, Karen, attending meetings held by Sardo, “a thousand-year-old American Indian inhabiting the body of a teenage girl in Paducah” (21). The girl has enough followers and supporters that she drives a Porsche. Indeed, there is an age of difference between this teenager who is self-motivated and aware enough to heed her own preachings—“the answers are in yourself” (26)—while knowing her followers will not. Again, Mason's few characters who do sincerely subscribe to a universe ordered by God are a vanishing minority, and the vast majority of religious practitioners are money-driven fakes and their naive followers. Most of her characters are not bound by any religious traditions or moral codes.

Derived in part from the collapse of defining religious institutions, confusion abounds in Mason's stories about conventional masculine and feminine roles. As Harriet Pollack writes, “Her women have moved beyond the clear gender conceptions with which they were raised and now face the dilemma of saying what should stand in place of those conceptions” (97). In “The Retreat,” Georgeann participates in a workshop on Christian marriage during which one woman intones, “God made man so that he can't resist a woman's adoration. She should treat him as a priceless treasure, for man is the highest form of creation. A man is born of God—and just think, you get to live with him” (Shiloh 143). Georgeann feels wholly unable to gain sustenance from this traditional view of marital relations and yet knows no viable alternative.

Troubled by her parents' stifling view of proper masculine and feminine behavior, Jane in “Airwaves” remembers a story her late mother told her about a woman trapped in a cage with a lion who wanted to mate with her, and how, under the trainer's instructions, the woman “had to stroke the lion until he was satisfied” (Love Life 192). Jane recalls that that “was more or less how her mother always told her she had to be with a husband, or a rapist” (192). The rough equation of husband and rapist, and the assumption that a woman's duty is to submit to men, friendly or unfriendly, does not seem to Jane appropriate for her life. When her father lectures her, “The trouble is, too many women are working and the men can't get jobs. … Women should stay at home” Jane warns him to be quiet (185). The outdated gender role messages she receives from her parents make her uncertain about what rules apply to present day romances, and of what she wants with her on-again off-again boyfriend, Coy. For example, while Coy's gentleness makes him fit the Phil Donahue audience's criteria of the perfect man, she sometimes wishes he were more aggressive (Love Life 192).

In “Midnight Magic” Steve is even more confused about proper masculine behavior. When his girlfriend becomes furious with him for impersonating the neighborhood rapist and surprising her in her apartment, Steve thinks, “But it was just a game. She should have known that” (Love Life 27). It is as if Karen angrily refuses to play the role of the submissive woman that Jane of “Airwaves” learned from her parents, that so many women of that generation internalized and so many men expected. Steve still tries to act according to the rules of the previous generation and cannot understand why Karen does not play along. Earlier, his attempt to flirt with a woman in the laundromat goes sour when she snatches her panties away before he can grab them from her basket (26). He is thoroughly puzzled about what he is doing wrong, why women respond negatively to his best enactment of a playfully aggressive male.

Mason's world is one in which people find conventional gender roles stultifying and religious institutions irrelevant; as a result her characters have no models for their emotions and actions, no clear roles to step into. Mason critic Albert Wilhelm writes: “Painful transitions have become more frequent and more intense, but the adaptive and adjustive response previously offered by ritual is frequently lacking” (273). The only thing working to fill the void of structure and certainty is popular culture, which tries to make clean, easy sense out of our confusing, painful lives; becomes the guide for making life decisions; and takes the space of knowing oneself and others. While the characters in Mason's stories are largely inarticulate, unfulfilled, and incapable of analyzing their feelings or of communicating deeply with others, the world presented through the forms of popular culture is one in which people are happy, enjoy warm relationships with friends and family, and are able to articulate their feelings.

The simple, familiar, knowable patterns of pop culture provide its consumers a feeling of security. Whether it is half-hour situation comedies like M*A*S*H and Mork and Mindy, rock music, video games, or music videos, these forms—typically with a set beginning, a problem introduced in the middle, and neat resolution at the end—provide solace to people who can cling to no understandable patterns in their own lives. In “Love Life” Opal watches a video on her favorite channel, MTV: “Now the TV is playing a song in which all the boys are long-haired cops chasing a dangerous woman in a tweed cap and a checked shirt. The woman's picture is in all their billfolds. … She hops on a motorcycle, and they set up a roadblock, but she jumps it with her motorcycle. Finally, she slips onto a train and glides away from them, waving a smiling goodbye” (1). In a three minute span Opal can vicariously experience freeing herself from repressive conventions without even having to confront the trapped feelings of her own life.

Characters throughout Mason's fictional world turn to popular culture to fill the void in their lives. In “The Retreat” Georgeann starts skipping the religious workshops to play video games in the basement of the lodge where the retreat is located. As the day passes, she improves her game: “The situation is dangerous and thrilling, but Georgeann feels in control. She isn't running away; she is chasing the aliens” (Shiloh 145). Georgeann, feeling less and less content with living the life of the conventional wife of a pastor and with her relationship with Shelby and increasingly confused about what to do about her unhappiness, finds a temporary solution in playing the video game, which lets her imagine taking control of her life.

On the drive home from the retreat, Shelby asks what he can do to make her happy, to which she responds, “I was happy when I was playing that game” (146). Indeed, the kind of happiness that amounts to a numbness, as Georgeann explains, making “you forget everything but who you are” (146), is the only kind she can imagine for herself. The story ends with Georgeann nonchalantly taking a sick hen and cutting its head off, the same hen whose illness she had earlier hidden from her husband because she knew if he saw a sick chicken he would kill it. Now, when she crashes the ax down on its head, “Georgeann feels nothing, only that she has done her duty” (147). Apparently, playing video games all day long has desensitized her to pain. And, since Georgeann herself was ill earlier in the story—infected by chicken mites,—and since she is in effect the “mother hen” of her family, the implication is she has become inured to her own pain through playing the video games.

In “Airwaves” Jane tries to recover from the pain of Coy's breaking up with her by blasting a rock station: “The sounds are numbing. Jane figures if she can listen to hard rock in her sleep, she won't care that Coy has gone” (Love Life 180). Later, as she contemplates joining the army, she imagines it as a scene on television, and likens war to rock and roll: “She pictures herself someplace remote, in a control booth, sending signals for war, like an engineer in charge of a sports special on TV. … The sounds of warfare would be like the sounds of rock and roll, hard-driving and satisfying” (196). Her notion of the world derives almost exclusively from what she has seen on television, so that she must filter any new experience through the lens of popular culture forms. Again, like Georgeann's experience playing video games, Jane imagines both a sense of control and of numbness. And Jane judges relationships, too, by how they fit into her slanted sense of the world. When her father suggests she move in with him after Coy leaves her, she responds that it would never work because “we don't like the same TV shows anymore” (185).

In “A New-Wave Format” Edwin drives a bus whose passengers are retarded, and, like his idol, Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati, he acts as disk jockey, playing tapes of carefully chosen music. The bus passengers are exaggerated representatives of the average American's anesthetized state. Freddie Johnson's ten word-vocabulary consists of “‘Hot!,” “Shorts” “Popeye on?. … Dukes on!” “Cook supper” and “Go bed’” (Shiloh 217). Similarly, most of the concerns of Edwin and his girlfriend, Sabrina, involve television and eating: “They share a love of Fudgsicles, speedboats, and WKRP in Cincinnati” (215).

When Edwin tries to adapt to the times, modernizing the music he plays for his passengers, the new-wave format creates a sensation: “Edwin believed the passengers understood what was happening. The frantic beat was a perfect expression of their aimlessness and frustration” (228). Sabrina herself likes listening to new-wave music that strikes Edwin as “violent and mindless, with a fast beat like a crazed parent abusing a child, thrashing it senseless” (227). These descriptions portray a culture of people attempting to fill the void in their lives with mindless sound, substituting numbness for self-analysis. Edwin's sense of the music's violence attests to the desperate need of these people, a need requiring extreme measures to pacify. Americans thrash themselves with the forms of popular culture in their attempt to deaden unpleasant, unacknowledged feelings; the beat of the culture's music stands in as parent, as rule-maker, but it is a crazed parent, whose only order is a frenzied thrashing. The forms of civilization that Freud saw humanity erecting in order to protect people from themselves seem here dangerously eroded.

In a world in which popular culture takes the place of formerly framing institutions and conventions, happiness comes to the few who are able to believe in popular culture's salutary power. In “Airwaves” Coy is depressed until he gets a job as a Wal-Mart floor walker. Jane visits him there and is unimpressed: “In his brown plaid pants, blue shirt, and yellow tie, he looked stylish and comfortable, as though he had finally found a place where he belonged. He seemed like a man whose ambition was to get a service award so he could have his picture in the paper, shaking hands with his boss” (Love Life 195). After she leaves, she thinks of “how proudly Coy had said, ‘We're taking inventory’ as though he were in thick with Wal-Mart executives” (195). Floorwalking at Wal-Mart, an icon of consumer-oriented popular culture, is enough for Coy to feel like he plays an important role in society. Here Mason looks at the remarkable trend of young Americans' allying themselves with corporate culture to make themselves feel accepted. Today one may go to a mall or a college campus and be hard pressed to find anyone not wearing clothing that loudly identifies a corporation. Mason suggests one way to be happy in our popular culture is truly to believe its shallow messages.

The two other happy characters in these stories are Karen from “Midnight Magic,” who enjoys feeling herself a part of the community of the religious fake Sardo, and Sabrina from “A New-Wave Format” who lands a bit part in Oklahoma!. Not surprisingly, Sabrina's favorite song begins, “Attention, all you K Mart shoppers, fill your carts” (Shiloh 220). The high she gets from delivering her two lines in Oklahoma! is only the beginning: “She is full of hope, like the Christmas season. … she has a new job at McDonald's and a good part in Life with Father” (229). Working at the most powerful popular culture icon ever, and having a part, no matter how small, in a famous musical is enough to make Sabrina feel utterly fulfilled: she believes the role she plays.

But most people cannot so believe. Georgeann in “The Retreat” becomes increasingly aware of her unhappiness but manages to find only the temporary solution of playing video games to distance herself from her pain. Early in “Airwaves” Jane numbs herself by playing rock music loudly, but as the story progresses, she admits the cure has been ineffective: “Jane is not sure the hard-rock music has hardened her to pain and distraction” (Love Life 191). She longs to be close to people but does not know how, so she becomes obsessed with the actual physics of communication, sound waves. In this way, she is able to imagine a connection with others. She thinks that the way sound travels must be similar to the way voices from heaven travel to her brother, and when she orders food from a drive-in, she hears on the employees' radio the same station she is listening to (186) and thus feels connected to them. And indeed, this is the method popular culture offers people as a means of feeling close to others. A passing car may blast a radio station as the driver's way of proclaiming, “This is me!” and those who listen to the same station feel connected to the driver. Or a person feels close to someone sporting a Nike T-shirt, because he himself has a Nike shirt at home. Hobson notes that Mason's characters find themselves “forever riding a wave of popular culture, popular music and television programs in particular, wherever it takes them, deriving their values, their mythology, even their sense of time and family and community, their identity, from shared rock stars and television programs” (Southern 12). This shallow, unfulfilling means of connection is the best Jane can find, so at the end of the story she joins the Army to pursue “Communications and Electronic Operations” (195).

In “Midnight Magic” Steve realizes he is unhappy but does not know how to better his life. He feels “empty inside, doomed” (Love Life 21), when he thinks his relationship with his girlfriend pales in comparison to the one his friend, Doran, has with a woman he marries after six weeks. At other times Steve “has sudden feelings of desperation he can't explain” (28). Again, television and movies have taught him confusing, inadequate lessons, first among them that a good model of a relationship is one in which right from the start a couple is perfect for one another and marries after six weeks. Since his relationship with Karen does not fall into this category, he feels something is wrong. Later in the story, he finds out from Doran that all may not be well with the newlyweds, but the damage from Steve's skewed perceptions is already done. When Steve, discontent, tries but fails to spice up his relationship with Karen by pretending to be the neighborhood rapist, he finds consolation by envisioning himself expertly playing the role he has no doubt seen on television many times: “If he were the neighborhood rapist scouting out her apartment, he would hide in the dark doorway of the delivery entrance of the dry cleaner's downstairs, and when she came in at night, pointing the way with her key, he'd grab her tight around the waist” (27–28). The lessons he has learned from popular culture about relationships and self-empowerment not only fail to teach him how to be happy, but are warped.

If a character does take a step toward being more introspective, this movement is usually accompanied by a consequent increased distance in his or her relationships with others, since the other members of society remain largely unself-aware and uncommitted to change. In “Airwaves,” when Jane decides she wants to become closer to the people she loves, she attempts to have a revealing conversation with her father. She asks him what he did years ago when he left his wife and children, and then proceeds to open up and tell him how she felt as a child at that time. As she recites her feelings she gets renewed courage from the way her father seems to be listening intently, patiently nodding. After she finishes he pauses so long that “Jane thinks he must be working up to a spectacular confession or apology” (Love Life 193). Instead, he simply remarks, “‘The Constitution is damaged all to hell’” (193). His comically inadequate response both points to the way popular culture teaches people to divert attention from their psyches to less personally troubling targets and suggests that the problem really is with the constitution of America, a country whose framework is truly damaged.

In “A New-Wave Format” Edwin's compassion for his passengers leads him toward introspection and to an honest attempt to look at his past and what it means. However, looking into and understanding himself means distancing himself from his girlfriend, who finds the antics of his retarded patrons alarming and disgusting. The story's end suggests their break-up is near: “The thought of her fennel toothpaste … fills him with something like nostalgia, as though she is already only a memory” (Shiloh 231).

At the end of O'Connor's “Good Country People,” Manley Pointer taunts the atheist Ph.D. Hulga Hopewell with, “You ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” (291). In Mason's world, it is not only the depraved grotesques like Pointer, roaming the boundaries of southern society, who believe in nothing, but the culture as a whole. The South as Mason depicts it has degenerated into a band of more innocuous Pointers, complacent, shallow, unguided by anything besides the ideology of popular culture. But though Mason's world is free of truly evil characters like this phony Bible salesman, hers is a potentially dangerous world without the boundaries Freud saw social structures necessarily erecting. Mason examines the danger that comes from being in between, in nowhere land after the framing institutions have lost their power, replaced only by an amoral popular culture. Hers is a world in which average young American men fantasize about themselves as rapists, where young women imagine the satisfying excitement of fighting in a war, where middle-aged women chop off chickens' heads like so many video game aliens, and where a busload of pacified retarded adults waits to explode.

Works Cited

Brinkmeyer, Robert H. “Finding One's History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature.” Southern Literary Journal 19.2 (1987): 20–33.

Butler, Jack. “Still Southern After All These Years.” Humphries and Lowe 33–40.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.

Gorra, Michael. Rev. of Midnight Magic, by Bobbie Ann Mason. The New York Times Book Review. 8 August 1998: 7.

Hobson, Fred. “Of Canons and Cultural Wars: Southern Literature and Literary Scholarship after Midcentury” Humphries and Lowe 72–86.

———. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991.

Humphries, Jefferson and John Lowe, eds. The Future of Southern Letters. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. Love Life. New York: Harper, 1989.

———. Midnight Magic. Hopewell: Ecco P, 1998.

———. Shiloh, and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1982.

Morphew, G. O. “Downhome Feminists in Shiloh, and Other Stories” Southern Literary Journal. 21(1989): 41–49.

O'Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” The Complete Stories. New York: Noonday, 1946. 271–291.

Pollack, Harriet. “From Shiloh to In Country to Feather Crowns: Bobbie Ann Mason, Women's History, and Southern Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal 28 (1996): 95–116.

Smith, Virginia A. “Between the Lines: Contemporary Southern Women Writers, Gail Godwin, Bobbie Ann Mason, Lisa Alther and Lee Smith.” Diss. Penn State U, 1989.

Wilhelm, Albert E. “Private Rituals: Coping with Change in the Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason.” The Midwest Quarterly 28 (1987): 271–282.