SOURCE: Krasteva, Yonka. “The South and The West in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.” Southern Literary Journal 26, no. 2 (spring 1994): 77–90.

[In the following essay, Krasteva maintains that while In Country takes place in an American South changed by urban life and pop culture, Mason does not strip her fictional world of the tenets of Southern tradition and community.]

It has often been suggested that the New South emerged after the two World Wars, and after World War II in particular, when its regional isolation diminished and its presence in the political life of the country began to be felt with Jimmy Carter's election as president. It can be argued that the war in Vietnam had a similar impact upon the South. Referring to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, Irene, the mother of the heroine in In Country, tells her daughter: “It was country boys. When you get to that memorial, you look at the names. … You look at the names and tell me if they are not mostly country boy names” (338). The treatment of the Vietnam war in In Country, as well as in Jayne Ann Phillip's Machine Dreams and in Larry Brown's Dirty Work, testifies to the end of the cultural and historical isolation of the South and to the emergence of a postmodern awareness of the self's existence in a post-human, post-Christian world, and of the essential narratability of history itself. Many Southern writers have become actively engaged in the contemporary discourse on power, domination and the crisis of representation, introducing a fresh, unmistakably Southern perspective.

Bobbie Ann Mason's fictional world has been described by Maureen Ryan as “paradigmatic of the contemporary South” (294), and Robert Brinkmeyer has argued that the author “is charting a new direction for Southern fiction by adapting patterns from the past to enrich and comprehend the disorder of contemporary experience” (20). In Country is even more important in yet another way, for in creating a feminine postmodern character who strives to transcend the culturally inscribed “mental geographies” by critically examining, subverting, or redefining basic concepts such as home, manifest destiny, history and knowledge, Bobbie Ann Mason proclaims both the end of Southern cultural isolation and a radical break from dominant paradigms and role models. The novel bears witness to the changing conditions in the South, which seems to be losing its distinctiveness with industrialization and urbanization. Most of the protagonists of contemporary Southern fiction are steeped less in Southern culture than in television, rock video, and cinema, as is the case with Mason's heroine, Samantha Hughes, whose personal growth through the challenge of history is effected through her strong reliance on and adherence to the values of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Yet this new orientation does not mean a denunciation of the basic values of the past, for the characters have preserved their strong sense of place and are still defined by a deep attachment to home and community, though these concepts have been re-defined and historicized. In Beyond the Frontier, Harold Simonson argues that the tension between the promise of the open frontier and the tragic awareness of the finality of the closed frontier can be resolved in a “synthesis that is grounded in a more concrete sense of actual place” (3). In this way the sense of tragedy, experienced with the loss of the open frontier, can be confronted and sublimated through a realization of the significance of the values associated with the archetypal metaphor of home. Ultimately, In Country is a book about the construction of a female identity through a rigorous process of deciphering the meaning of widely held national beliefs, mythic concepts and symbolic images that construct both reality and the self.

While the dominant cultural myth of the questing white male celebrates the heroic conquering of space and the flight from the demands of society, the metaphor of home (the closed frontier) insists upon commitment, suffering, selflessness and caring. I will argue that the paradigm of home and reading is especially useful for the interpretation of In Country with its implications of growth and maturity, and the celebration of human bonds and love. Instead of pursuit of individual freedom and flight from social responsibility, the famous Southern example of which is Huckleberry Finn, Bobbie Ann Mason's eighteen-year-old heroine tries to imaginatively bridge the gap between the past and present, between the Old South and the New South, between the West as a mythic idea and an actual place. She undertakes an anguished intellectual and emotional journey, very different from the one on which the western hero embarks.

Samantha Hughes has to discover the meaning of the fabled “in country” landscape with which Vietnam has been identified and understand how it combines with her Southern heritage to build her, in a way, unique personality. While most of the adolescent questers before Sam placed their hopes on the “world beyond,” on the open frontier, striving to achieve the kind of fulfillment the cultural myth promises the male, she learns to search for meaning within recognizable and accepted limits. The result is a move away from the never-ending quest for new frontiers and from the strategy of evasion, to the establishment of human bonds and community, to an effort to confront the implications of the legacy of conquests.

Significantly, the heroine's initiatory journey does not take her to the mythic West, or to other unchartered territories identified as new American frontiers. It takes her to the end of the route of the westering experience, into the heart of the nation—the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C. Acting upon an idea, a myth, Columbus went west to find the fabled riches of the Orient and discovered America. Samantha's journey in the second half of the twentieth century takes an ironic reversal: her discovery of America and self demands a journey from Vietnam (the Orient), where her father had been killed, to the heart of the New continent. This reversal represents one of the several strategies Bobbie Ann Mason employs in order to parody the centrality of the frontier myth and its exclusion of women, ethnic minorities and subcultures. The direction of the heroine's journey is significant in yet another way, for she leaves the South in order to ponder the implications of history, which is not typical for Southern identity building. This act opens new horizons for exploration and brings a new awareness for self-fashioning. In Country, then, is also a story about the beneficial encounter of a Southerner with “otherness,” which makes her whole, confident and competent, aware of the complex ironies of modern life.

The paradigm on which the heroine's quest is patterned is not the celebrated one of discovery and conquest but of gendered reading, as defined by Annette Kolodny, and one that Langdon Elsbree calls “the archetypal action of establishing, consecrating a home” (32). Reading here is perceived as a continuous process of historical contextualization and decoding of the meaning of cultural phenomena for the purposes of arriving at a semblance of order amidst the discontinuous systems of signification modern life has come to represent. Reading “reality” in postmodern texts is like reading the scriptures. One has to be initiated into the act of semiotic interpretation in order to apprehend the meaning of what he/she sees or hears. The ideal is interpretive competence and not physical exploits or cunning. Significantly, it is spiritual space that is boundless, while man always tends to draw physical boundaries to mark off his “conquered” territory.

Samantha Hughes's search for the meaning of history and knowledge of self is also a search for family and home and for all they stand for. She ends up with a curious kind of regenerated family, involving three generations—herself, her uncle Emmett (a Vietnam veteran), and her grandmother. The absence of the father and mother is seen as a part of the legacy of conquest. The heroine successfully confronts her drama of bereavement by establishing new family bonds which promise reconciliation with the past through the redeeming power of insight, love and repentance. Bobbie Ann Mason revises the disintegrated traditional family by bringing into its center previously removed or marginal figures. They are bound together not so much by their blood kinship as by their spiritual kinship. A new kind of genealogy is being established, defined not by the patriarchal Law-of-the-name-of-the-father but by the existence of the “other.” It is the shared perception of the significance of “otherness” for identity formation and for understanding history that is the basis for resurrection of the family and the absolution of ancestral sin. It is clear that the vision of a spiritual home, transcending genealogical and regional boundaries, is inspired by the idea of the Christian community that does not discriminate between peoples, genders and race.

Simonson's metaphor of the closed frontier is useful to my analysis chiefly due to its implications of maturity and responsibility. As far as his idea of the importance of place and region are concerned, the novel offers a much more complex, postmodern perception of space. The notion of “site” and “locale” is no longer the one we associate with such books as The Leatherstocking Novels, Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn, where the landscape satisfies both the hero's longing for freedom and adventure, and the celebration of pure male bonding. “Place” and “location” (in a Foucauldian sense) here signify an environment that itself can be read like a text. Subject to reading are national monuments and flags, symbolic gestures and dress, landscape and TV images. Through the book the image of the wall remains all important (with accompanying images of pictures, diaries, emblems, suggestive of hidden meaning), and culminates in its most commanding realization—the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the most compelling national symbol of the closed frontier.

In the opening chapter Sam, Emmett and Sam's grandmother are traveling on I-64 on their way to Washington. The final chapter describes their encounter with the monument. For a while the three travelers are stranded with a transmission problem, and before they resume their journey we learn what happened during “the summer of Michael Jackson tour and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. tour” (31). The contents of the novel are “walled in” by the image of the memorial wall, thus structurally implying a closure. The framed structure of the novel and Sam's mental and spiritual search for selfhood also imply a closed, familiar natural and internal landscape, inverting the open-ended male quest narrative with its vision of boundless space and limitless opportunities.

The heroine is launched on her quest by the oration of the Methodist minister at her graduation, who “preached about keeping the country strong, stressing sacrifice. He made Sam nervous. She started thinking about the war and it stayed in her mind all summer” (31). Sam's uneasiness stems from the realization of the deplorable confusion in the preacher's oration of sacred, spiritual ends with what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialistic nostalgia, generated in antebellum discourse by the myth of simple brute force” (70). The figure of the preacher, so important for Southern culture, alludes to the distinctly Baptist, Methodist and fundamentalist religious background of the South. In the context of the novel, though, it becomes clear that the vision of Christian sacrifice is not easily accommodated by contemporary history.

Sam's growing distrust of institutionalized discourse (history books and religious preaching) prompts her to challenge official historical accounts, mass media interpretation, role models, and basic national concepts such as innocence and Manifest Destiny. She realizes that her access to the kind of knowledge that would give her understanding of the past and help her define herself is blocked either by the denial of the people around her to talk about the war or by the obfuscating effects of the “dull history books” that explain nothing but only “got her bogged down in manifestoes and State Department documents” (77).

Facing the impenetrable wall of silence and amnesia, Samantha casts herself in the role of the detective to reconstruct the family history and to find out who she is, to write her own story. She gradually becomes aware of the fact that the stories we tell about history, the form in which we get history and its impact, are more revealing about human nature than the actual historical events. Samantha's search for the source of her name becomes literally a search for her father. She is keenly aware of the backwardness of her environment, especially when viewed against the background of the countercultural revolt of the '60s. Her mother calls their town Hopewell “Dopewell” because of its ignorant smugness, hostility toward change and otherness. The Vietnam veteran Tom, with whom Sam falls in love, complains, “Here everybody is looking backward—to old time days. Antiques and Civil War stuff” (113). Emmett “always says things never happen here until ten years later.” Yet they all persist in living there because, as Sam's friend Anita says, “it is home.”

The heroine's attitude to her Southern background is ambivalent; she is both repelled and attracted by it. “She shuddered at the idea of growing up on a farm, doing chores, never getting to go to town” (18), but at one moment realizes that “she didn't really know where she was, or who she would be if all those people left town and walked into the sunset to live happily ever after” (225). It is quite clear that here “the sunset,” with its promise of happiness, is an allusion to the myth of the West, to the heroic wilderness experience, which is critically examined and rejected throughout the book in favor of a collective search for identity and community. Like most Southern writers, Bobbie Ann Mason examines the past within the family, with a strong attention to locale and community, dramatizing the painful transition of the South from the monolithic and traditional to the pluralistic and modern society.

Sam instinctively knows that only by opening herself to other people, whom she recognizes as revealingly different from her, only by trying to understand otherness, could she hope to gain knowledge about her own self. In the process of discovering and defining her own femininity, she stumbles upon the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity. Her grandparents, she understands, did not question Emmett's going to war, because they believed in gender roles and behavior. In the altercations with her grandfather, her grandmother bitterly remonstrates: “We were all for him going … You said the army would make a man out of him” (213). In an argument with her boyfriend, Lonnie, disclaiming his assertion that the war has nothing to do with her, Sam argues:

The way I look at it, it had everything to do with me. My daddy went over there to fight for Mom's sake, and Emmett went over there for Mom's sake and for my sake, to get revenge. If you went off to war, I'd bet you'd say it was for me. But if you are planning on joining the army, you might ask my opinion first.

(102)

Sam is voicing her bitter rejection of the persistent Southern tradition of seeing the Southern Lady as a symbol of a lost cause. Such an attitude drastically limits the prospects of Southern women by reducing them either into assets or commodities in men's lives. Apparently this was the role Sam's mother was expected to play, for she urges her daughter to go to university, because “Women can do anything they want now, just about” (240). Sam realizes that the claim that men go to war for the sake of their women and children is meant not only to justify violence but also to relegate women to the position of helpless dependents, thus perpetuating their infantilization and reducing them to mere objects in men's accounts of their heroic exploits and achievements.

Ironically, it is Sam's father who displays the traditional “womanish” characteristics and not his daughter. Paradoxically, when Sam “meets” her father, they are the same age, for he died when he was nineteen, arrested in his adolescence. “The soldier boy in the picture never changed,” reflects the heroine. “In a way that made him dependable. But he seemed so innocent” (94). It is the father who is “pure and innocent,” while the daughter is knowledgeable and experienced. She is shocked by the way in which he talks about the war in his letters. “He sounded like a preacher. He wrote about mission, God and his blessing. … They sounded strangely frivolous, as if they were on vacation, writing home wish-you-were here postcards. … In his letters Dwayne was just a kid” (259–61, 274).

It is clear to Sam that her father's interpretation of the world and American involvement in Vietnam is encoded in the “Manifest Destiny” rhetoric, intoning the pronouncements of the Methodist preacher at her graduation ceremony. From this perspective the war is seen as just another holy crusade in the name of democracy. In her search the heroine gradually develops a historic consciousness that enables her to see clearly the mythic entrapments into which her father fell. She interprets the conflicts as another war for power and domination when, as she puts it, “America's got to put on its cowboy boots and stomp around and show somebody a thing or two” (318), asserting its aggressive masculine image.

Sam is disappointed that her father never describes what Vietnam is like, which to her is the most important clue to the secret. She knows that the spirit of the place affects and defines people, but she is also aware of the fact that it is language that endows a specific place with value, thus influencing the way in which people relate to it. How did Vietnam affect her father? What made it easy for him to kill the Vietnamese? Since she does not find the answers to these haunting questions in his letters, she decides to pay a visit to her grandparents, to see what her father's world looked like before he went to war.

By reading the landscape she hopes to be able to read her father's mind: “She looked around the farm, trying to see in a new way what her father had known, the world he knew before he went to Vietnam. … She thought she could comprehend him. Everything he knew was small and predictable: Jesus bugs, hound dogs, fence pots” (286). It is the image of the Old South she sees, preindustrial, isolated, clinging to tradition. The peaceful, pastoral image of the Southern farm bespeaks a landscape of maternal ambiance, where, as Annette Kolodny argues, “Life was experienced as a regression from adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast” (6). This passivity and resignation facilitates the imposition of ideologically charged role models in a culture that stimulates hero-worship rather than personality building.

The serenity of the pastoral farm seems to disclaim the knowledge of violence and wrongdoing, and Sam feels inclined to excuse the childish and cheerful tone of her father's letters, that is, to excuse his ignorance. But the revelation the diary brings about his response to his first killing of an enemy soldier shatters all her hopes of his presumed innocence:

Big surprise. Face to face with a VC and I won. Easier than I thought. But there wasn't time to think. It was so simple. … Sam felt sick. … Her father hadn't said how he felt about killing the VC. He just reported it, as though it were something he had to do sooner or later, like a test in school.”

(293–95)

Sam rejects the traditional assumption of war as the ultimate test for manhood and its interpretation as national game. Paradoxically, she feels guilty about her father's and uncle's deeds. At first she is tempted to ignore the past, to “just forget about her father and dismiss the whole Hughes clan along with him. They were ignorant and country anyway” (295), she reasons, “but it has always been something like a horror movie. Now everything seemed suddenly so real, it enveloped her, like something rotten she had fallen into, like a skunk smell, but she felt she had to live with it for a long time before she could take a bath” (296). The bath here quite clearly symbolizes the idea of rebirth and catharsis.

Since her cultural heritage has provided her with only one model for regeneration, the frontier myth, Sam decides to explore its relevance to her experience. “If men went to war for women and unborn generations,” she ponders, “then she was going to find out what they went through,” and she decides to spend a night “in country,” at the snake-infested Cawood's Pond, “because it was the last place in Western Kentucky where a person could really face the wild” (299). In order to come as close as possible to the experience in the jungle, Sam appropriates the language of the GIs in Vietnam. She imagines she is “walking points,” “the first watch,” or “humping the boonies,” which, in Emmett's words, “means going out to some godforsaken wilderness and doing what you have to do to survive” (194).

With her experiment the heroine also challenges the ultimate value of physical survival associated with the cultural rite of initiation. In the morning Sam reasons: “She had survived. But she did not know what to do. She wished the bird would come. If the bird would come, then she would leave” (310). She is looking for the same bird, the egret, for which Emmett has been looking for years. The first two sentences of the quote mock the blindness of the mythic hero as to the real significance of his physical survival. The bird clearly symbolizes the hankerings of the soul and insists upon the needs of the spirit. The bird symbol can easily be traced to the New Testament, where birds symbolize Christian souls. Sam's and Emmett's search for the bird affirms the higher value of spiritual over physical survival, for as Christ teaches, according to St. John's Gospel, “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer” (John 7: 11).

The protagonist's excursion into the wilderness is both a gendered intervention and subversion of a typically male paradigm, and an attempt at a construction of a female rite of initiation. Patriarchal authority is ultimately destroyed, and the narrative subverts the phallocentric logos defined by the father, preacher, boyfriend, etc. It asserts the importance of the spiritual continuation between mother and daughter for the redefinition of family bonds and the reestablishment of a state of normalcy, based on the code of reciprocity. The relationship between mother and daughter furnishes a new model of the mentor figure, flexible and stimulating by its insistence on openness and on a permanent state of awareness. Irene never imposes her opinions on her daughter. Her authority is far from obtrusive. By her physical absence, leaving Sam in isolation, so that she could understand the full import of her “identity crisis,” the mother enhances her mentor's power to stimulate the female rite of passage. Given her mother's example—her association with the counterculture and her power to regenerate her family—Sam formulates a new concept of courage. Midway in her search, she speculates: “Something had to change. There was so much she had to find out before she took off like her mother. Her mother had got rid of the memories. She found someone else to love” (94). The heroine's language is markedly sentimental with her constant insistence on caring and love. As Jane Tompkins has convincingly demonstrated in Sensational Designs, sentimental language is intertextually related to religious language and affirms the basic values of the Christian register. At the same time at which she rejects the frontier rite of “regeneration through violence,” Sam is being initiated into the code of reciprocity and affirms its ritual of caretaking. It is also indicative that she indulges in reflexivity rather than introspection, thus escaping the dangerous absorption of the self at the expense of the other.

Sam's harrowing of hell at Cawood's Pond does not involve an encounter with the monster but affords the more unsettling encounter with otherness through an intense contestation of codes of signification and deciphering of the meaning of symbolic actions. Looking at a “million tiny black ants,” she is reminded of Emmett's horror of fleas. Suddenly it dawns upon her that

… the fleas are the Vietnamese. How often had she heard the enemy soldiers compared to ants, or to other creatures too numerous to count … Emmett had helped kill those Vietnamese, in the same way he killed fleas, the same way people kill ants. It was easy, her father wrote … In his sleep, Emmett was out to kill, in spite of himself.

(300)

The heroine gets an insight into the ways in which cultural discourse constructs both the self and the other. Vocabulary choices reveal to her traditional attitudes of aggression and conquest embedded in institutionalized discourse, which encodes otherness to the demands of culture. Since naming is knowing, such asymmetrical representations of otherness bespeak a general attitude of the human psyche to ban, or efface, or refashion, that which is strange, unknown, different and hence disturbing. Knowledge, as Foucault has convincingly argued, brings power. By naming the other, we also control him/her, control the unknown and dangerous aspects which we cannot afford to confront. Given the fact that the discourse of the other is also the discourse of our own unconscious, the urge to ignore, distort, or represent otherness in a way that makes it possible to accommodate it within the boundaries of received knowledge bespeaks also the desire to ignore the unsettling demands of the unconscious, for which there is no logical explanation. Everything that cannot be accounted for by logic—and the discourse of the unconscious does not yield itself to logical explanations—has been branded as chaotic, irrational, destructive. Still, it is an aspect of ourselves. Samantha's exercise in intersubjectivity reveals exactly this secret, for in reading her father's unconscious (his diary), she is shocked into a disturbing recognition. Her father's absorption with the rotting corpse of an enemy soldier reminds her of “the dead cat she dug up once in Grandma's garden, and she realized her own intense curiosity was just like her father's. She felt humiliated and disgusted. The diary made her wonder what she would do in his situation. Would she call them gooks?” (294). Sam's perception of otherness evokes Gabriel Marcel's concept of intersubjectivity, and its relevance to the solving of the puzzle of self. As Mary D. Howland observes, “only by opening ourselves to other people of whom we conceive as ‘thous’ can we participate in … the mystery of being” (10). The gift of the Other is the ability to spell out important revelations about ourselves, about the human condition in general. Discovering otherness involves questioning the essence and relevance of received knowledge, examination of the tenuous relationship between language and “reality,” and awareness of the “conservatism” of dominant discourse, exhibited in its reluctance to coin new words to describe strange environment or landscape, but persists in applying familiar old codes to map out unknown, strange terrain. The landscape of Vietnam has also to be rewritten in order to fit cherished notions about the “eternal return” of the “sacred past.” Vietnam is transformed into “in country,” a new frontier, devised by history for the glorious repetition of the wars with the Indians. Gradually, Sam becomes aware of the fact that attitudes towards war and otherness are also cultural constructs and it matters a lot who has control over their representation and institutionalization.

The heroine's “wilderness experience” does not bring regeneration but rather a heightened state of awareness about the essence of the relationship between language and “reality,” and the experience brings her closer to Emmett. The nature of the relationship between them inverts the implications of the mythic male pairs in American culture. Emmett can in no way be interpreted as a descendant of the heroic frontiersman, for he has consciously discarded all attributes of manhood and nobility associated with the frontier myth and the Southern gentleman and has appropriated the attributes of the marginalized other. For the smug inhabitants of Hopewell he is the very embodiment of radical, dangerous difference. He wears an Indian skirt and long hair and scandalizes the small town by flying a Viet Cong flag on its courthouse.

It is later, during her “in country” experience, that Sam divines the full import of this heavily textured situation and also understands why her mother has refused to honor the flag and the dead, “for it means honoring the cause.” The flying of the Viet Cong flag on an American courthouse implies the rejection of the values inscribed in the official discourse and legitimized by the institutions, and questions the American concept of justice. On the other hand, the pony tail, the headband and the Indian skirt that Emmett and the hippies wear signify their identification with the victims of American history, the acceptance of the ethnic other, and, by implication, of one's own unconscious, as a substantial part of the definition of the self. At the same time it acknowledges the humanity of the other, this implication mounts an impassioned attack on the cultural politics of marginalization and exclusion. Emmett and Sam are involved in a beneficial exercise of intersubjectivity where the ego and the other, female and male consciousness, meet, through the perception of each other's perception of the same object. Thus they help each other in their mutual quest for authentic spirituality and psychic liberation. In the process of experiencing transpersonal togetherness, they are initiated into the code of reciprocity. And again, in this process it is interpretative competence and the ritual of caretaking that are the ideal and not hero worship and imitation.

As a result of her intensive training in reading signs and signifiers, Sam becomes fully aware of the postmodern crisis of representation. Her newly acquired competence in interpreting textured environment and her awareness of the textuality of history are convincingly revealed in the way in which she interprets the meaning of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial:

The memorial cuts a V in the ground like the wings of an abstract bird, huge and headless. … At the bottom of the wall is a granite trough, and on the edge of it the sunlight reflects the names just above, in mirror writing, upside down. … The shiny surface of the wall reflects the Lincoln memorial and the Washington monument at opposite angles. If she moves slightly to her left, she sees the monument, and if she moves the other way she sees the reflection of the flag opposite. Both the monument and the flag seem like arrogant gestures, like the country giving the finger to the dead boys, flung in the hole in the ground.

(344–45)

The key words in this passage are “wall” and “hole,” creating an entirely funereal atmosphere, doing away with all notions of glory and victory, subverting the official interpretation of American history as a glorious crusade for democracy. It is on this funerary, man-made frontier and not in the wilderness that Sam experiences ritualistic death and rebirth, for it is here that she finally solves the riddle of her name. After locating her father's name on the wall, she is shocked to read her own name on it: “SAM ALAN HUGHES. … She touches her own name. How odd it feels, as though all the names in America have been used to decorate this monument” (351). Both Sam and Emmett display a ritualistic response to death and rebirth, for “Emmett faces the wall as though he were watching birds” (348). He too, had come through his harrowing of hell to reclaim his lost self. Commenting on “the poverty of ritual” in Bobbie Ann Mason's world, Albert Wilhelm draws on Mircea Eliade's definition of ritualistic death which “provides the clean slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is the formation of a new person” (278). The end of the novel marks the closure of the liminal stage in Sam and Emmett's rite of initiation. Wilhelm sees them as “characters valiantly trying to cope by means of their own impoverished rite of passage” (287). In fact, they have created their own rite of passage and affirmed its code of reciprocity.

Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country participates in the general postmodernist decentralization of dominant cultural paradigms and testifies to the emergence of a new mentality in Southern writing, freed of the haunting images of the past, of the absorption with guilt and defeat. The liberating effect of this transformation affirms the importance of the sense of place and belonging to the need to reexamine the validity of the relationship between language and place in the effort to establish the authentic meaning of a place. In the novel, the self emerges as historic and not a mythic identity, a self defined by both the past and the present.

Samantha Hughes is an impressive alternative to the passive Southern heroine, the “belle” and the “lady,” the traditional stereotypes of feminine behavior. By creating a narrative about the emergence of a modern feminine identity, Bobbie Ann Mason not only decenters the dominant narrative paradigm of discovery and conquest by substituting for it the paradigm of reading and home, she also constructs a female rite of passage. Samantha Hughes succeeds where her predecessors have failed—in coming of age. Coming of age now requires a redefinition of the concept of knowledge, history and self, insists upon the recognition of life's limitations and upon the acceptance of moral responsibility. At the end of the book Sam and Emmett are smiling; happiness is possible within the frontier, the dream is the land itself. “America the beautiful”—this phrase keeps popping up in the heroine's mind as she contemplates the vast stretches of scenic landscape on her ride from the small Southern town to Washington. The mythic journey of the heroic Westerner and the Southerner's guilty absorption with the past seem to have come full circle. A new age is dawning—the final consecration of America as home.

Works Cited

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

Elsbree, Langdon. “Our Pursuit of Loneliness: An Alternative to this Paradigm.” The Frontier Experience and the American Dream. Ed. David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant. Texas A & M UP, 1989.

Howland, Mary D. The Gift of the Other: Gabriel Marcel's Idea of Intersubjectivity in Walker Percy's Novels. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1990.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Culture and Truth: The Making of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Ryan, Maureen. Stopping Places: Bobbie Ann Mason's Short Stories. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1984.

Simonson, Harold. Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism and a Sense of Place. Austin: U of Texas P, 1989.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Wilhelm, Albert E. “Private Rituals: Coping with Change in the Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason.” The Midwest Quarterly 28 (1987): 271–82.