Mason's first collection of short stories, Shiloh, and Other Stories, was generally well-received by critics. Robert Towers observed that Mason “is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader.’¹ Anne Tyler recognized Mason as already “a full-fledged master of the short story.” Tyler applauded Mason's compassionate treatment of her characters who, although feeling “bewilderment” at the changes that confront them, nevertheless try to adapt to them with an “optimistic faith in progress.”² Tyler observed that “it is especially poignant that the characters in these stories, having led more sheltered lives than the average reader, are trying to deal with changes that most of us already take for granted.”³ Mason herself has reflected that the “strength of my fiction has been the tension between being from there and not from there”⁴ and has commented that “My work seems to have struck a chord with a number of readers who have left home and maybe who have rejected it, and I think it startles them because they thought they were rid of it.”⁵ Andrew Levy points out that in Mason's own view, the appeal of her stories to the lower-upper-class or upper-middle-class readership of such magazines as the New Yorker lies in the fact that “reading her stories, like writing them, constitutes an act of reconciliation with the home that is left behind.”⁶ Moreover, Levy continues, “the ‘home’ that is left behind is not just rural Kentucky, but the popular culture that is repudiated (or diluted) by a rising middle class, or an entrenched upper class.” According to Levy, Mason's stories, therefore, appeal to an audience that is largely “displaced out of its class of origin” through the “reconciliation” of class differences that they represent.⁷

Other reviewers argued that the stories in Shiloh epitomized the limitations of “minimalist” writing. Robert Dunn, for example, commented that the stories are an example of “private interest fiction” in that their characters, lacking a sense of history, focus their anxieties about cultural change exclusively through a diminished world of private relationships.⁸ Similarly, John Barth and Ben Yagoda, while recognizing that this fiction aspires to give a realistic representation of a consumer culture dominated by television, lamented its perceived failure to offer a broader, historicized interpretation of that culture.⁹ Yagoda concluded that writers of such fiction, including Mason, “give us random and unimaginatively chosen details and events, signifying nothing.”¹⁰

As the reviewers observed, the most initially striking quality of the short stories collected in Shiloh is Mason's evocative rendering of the details of the daily lives of her characters. The central theme of the stories is the way in which Mason's characters respond to the changes effected by contemporary culture on formerly rural life in western Kentucky. Mason generally renders the narrative perspective on these changes either through a working-class character who is trying to adjust to the cultural shifts through which he or she is living or through an educated, newly middle-class woman character who is reflecting on some of the changes in order to interpret her past and present life.

The thematic coherence of the collection as a whole is underpinned by two of the stories, “Residents and Transients” and “Shiloh.” “Residents and Transients” is the first-person narrative of Mary, who has returned to her childhood home in Kentucky after spending eight years away, “pursuing higher learning.”¹¹ Those closest to Mary have embraced change: her parents have moved to Florida, and her husband has moved to Louisville, expecting his wife to follow. Due to the years Mary has spent away from “home,” married to a “Yankee,” she now feels like an exile even when she is there. She seeks stability in her parents' farm and particularly the remembered rituals of the canning room. As she recalls time spent with her lover, Larry, a local dentist, Mary's increasing anxiety about her own identity and her sense of paralysis before the choices confronting her become apparent. She tries to remind herself of who she is by itemizing the components of her identity: “I am nearly thirty years old. I have two men, eight cats, no cavities” (127). But her world appears to be dissolving as her husband, who is “processing words” over the telephone, makes her “think of liquidity, investment postures. I see him floppy as Raggedy Andy, loose as a goose” (131). Mary's dissociation both from her husband's words and values and from herself is reflected in her observation that “I see what I am shredding in my hand as I listen. It is Monopoly money” (131).

As Mary and her lover drive back toward the farm at night, she sees “a rabbit move. It is hopping in place, the way runners will run in place. Its forelegs are frantically working, but its rear end has been smashed and it cannot get out of the road” (130). To Mary the rabbit becomes “a tape loop that crowds out everything else,” like Stephen's words, which liquefy in her mind. To the reader the rabbit may serve as a metaphor for Mary's own immobilization. In this story, as in others, Mason weaves in images that may be used by the reader to interpret the unfolding narrative.

Here, more unusually, the metaphoric potential of the images is apparent to the story's narrator, which enables her to approach an interpretation of her situation and from this to take some control over the choices that confront her. Mary explains to Larry: “In the wild, there are two kinds of cat populations … Residents and transients. Some stay put, in their fixed home ranges, and others are on the move. They don't have real homes. Everybody always thought that the ones who establish territories are the most successful … They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums, the losers.” But, she continues, “it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence” (128–9). The image of residents and transients resonates throughout the collection as a metaphor for Mason's characters' ambivalence toward “home.” By analogy with this information about cats, Mary is able to reflect upon her own indecision about whether to stay at home or to leave. The final image of the story is typical of Mason's concluding images in its ambiguity. It evokes Mary's new receptiveness to change, but she is still watching herself waiting, rather than acting: “I see a cat's flaming eyes coming up the lane to the house. One eye is green and one is red, like a traffic light. … In a moment I realize that I am waiting for the light to change” (131).

The theme of the conflict between the desires to stay at home, to leave, or to return; to recover the past or to forget it; to “let go” or to seek safety in “hanging on” is established in the first story, “Shiloh.” The wide anthologization and extensive critical study of this story attest to Mason's consummate achievement of a style that imitates the content of the story, as her representation of her characters' responses to change offers penetrating insights into their culture. Mason's sympathetic evocation of Leroy Moffitt exemplifies her compassionate interest in men who are struggling to adapt to changes that their women relatives or partners are finding at least partially empowering. Leroy is a truck driver who is unemployed after an accident has left him with a limp. Forced to give up his life on the road, Leroy observes with a sense of bewildered helplessness and fear the changes taking place in his hometown, his wife, and his marriage. Mason succinctly evokes Leroy's perception of the destructiveness of these changes in one simile: “Subdivisions are spreading across western Kentucky like an oil slick” (3). Terry Thompson has pointed out that “a subdivision is, first of all, a ‘backwards’ community: it is built on speculation before there are people to populate it.” Thompson glosses Mason's simile accordingly: “one could argue, oil spills are eventually cleaned up, but subdivisions continue to devour valuable farmland that could grow corn or wheat instead of sprouting generic ranch houses with generic mortgages and synthetic neighbors.”¹² As Leroy drives to a new shopping center, he realizes that the repopulation of the landscape has occurred through the erosion of the old economy and community as he remembered it: “The farmers who used to gather around the courthouse square on Saturday afternoons to play checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been years since Leroy has thought about the farmers, and they have disappeared without his noticing” (4). Leroy's nostalgia for the security of a simpler past is manifested in his making “things from craft kits,” beginning by “building a miniature log cabin from notched Popsicle sticks” that “reminds him of a rustic Nativity scene” (1). His hobby develops into a dream of building a log cabin as a home for himself and his wife, Norma Jean. This fantasy shows the value that the unemployed Leroy places on craftsmanship in the homogenized landscape of shopping malls and subdivisions and how he has turned to the American dream of self-reliance in a society to which he feels he has become superfluous.

The Moffitts' responses to change are differentiated along gender lines. Norma Jean has assimilated fragments of feminist discourse to forge her own American dream of progress as she seeks personal autonomy through further education, going to night school at Paducah Community College. She has also taken up bodybuilding, Leroy having introduced her to weights through the physical therapy he is doing to build up his weakened body. As, with Leroy, the reader watches Norma Jean “working on her pectorals,” she seems a testimony to consumer culture's dictum that to re-create the body is to reinvent the self. The apparent reversal of gender roles is provocatively commented upon by Norma Jean's mother, Mabel, who, observing Leroy's needlepoint, remarks: “That's what a woman would do” (6). Norma Jean's self-education is also producing signs of an emergent class difference between herself and her husband, as is suggested, for example, by Leroy's observation that “Recently Norma Jean has been cooking unusual food—tacos, lasagna, Bombay chicken” (11).

Leroy watches these changes in his wife apprehensively, realizing that “something is happening” and knowing “he is going to lose her” (11). He recognizes that in the years he spent on the road, “he was always flying past scenery” (2) and that in order to understand what is happening to him in the present, he must stop and reflect on the past. The loss of their son, Randy, by sudden infant death syndrome, several years ago is a fault line running through the Moffitts' marriage. They do not ever speak of this loss, although Leroy, deriving his knowledge from popular culture, “has read that for most people losing a child destroys the marriage—or else he heard this on Donahue” (3). Leroy, trying to recover some truth in memory, finds that he “can hardly remember the child anymore” but that he recalls vividly “a scene from Dr. Strangelove,” which the couple were watching at a drive-in when the child died in their car. The film serves as a displacement of too painful a memory. Mason evokes how images from the film became “facts” for Leroy while the emotional “truth” of the situation evaded him, such that he fantasized that the hospital was the “War Room” of Dr. Strangelove while wondering of his wife: “Who is this strange girl? He had forgotten who she was” (5). The shock of his sudden bereavement reverberates through the culture shock Leroy experiences later as he registers the cultural dislocations that are fracturing his marriage. Here, too, an involuntary forgetting protects Leroy from the painfulness of what memory may reveal: he resolves “to tell Norma Jean about himself, as if he had just met her,” but instantly “he forgets why he wants to do this” (9).

Observing his present situation, Leroy continues to look aslant rather than directly at the cause of his unhappiness, as for example in this passage: “He sees things about Norma Jean that he never realized before. When she chops onions, she stares off into a corner, as if she can't bear to look. She puts on her house slippers almost precisely at nine o'clock every evening and nudges her jogging shoes under the couch. She saves bread heels for the birds. Leroy watches the birds at the feeder. He notices the peculiar way goldfinches fly past the window. They close their wings, then fall, then spread their wings to catch and lift themselves. He wonders if they close their eyes when they fall. Norma Jean closes her eyes when they are in bed. She wants the lights turned out. Even then, he is sure she closes her eyes” (7). Norma Jean's averted gaze as she chops onions is paralleled by Leroy's: he can observe the literal details of her domestic rituals but will not pursue his observations further in order to reach an understanding of her behavior that may offer some insight into their relationship. Mason's mimetic representation of Leroy's small, self-contained observations through pared-down, clipped sentences could be read as an example of that minimalist writing that confines itself to the local detail, refusing to take any greater burden of interpretative authority for what is represented. On the other hand, it may be read as the effective exercise of the authorial control Mason had admired in Nabokov's writing, whereby “pain or grief becomes suggestively more intense because it is in the process of being toned down from raging torrents of tears and shrieks of pain. Authorial distance saves it from sentimentality and also makes it bearable for the reader.”¹³ It is through such authorial control that Mason is able to sustain a fine, ironic distance between her character's perception and her reader's. She creates for the reader the possibility of an interpretation that exceeds that of her characters while retaining consistency in her representation of the character's point of view. The return of Leroy's thoughts to Norma Jean after an apparently whimsical reflection on the flight of the goldfinches suggests his anguished desire to be certain that he still knows who his wife is. Leroy, who clings to facts and literal details, does not draw any conscious analogy between the falling goldfinches and his own feelings about himself and Norma Jean. For the reader, however, the goldfinches as they “close their wings, then fall, then spread their wings to catch and lift themselves” hover as a possible metaphor for either Leroy, trying to protect himself against change, or Norma Jean, who may be “falling” as she prepares to take flight. Characteristically, interpretation remains suspended as authorial resolution is withheld throughout.¹⁴

Leroy is prompted not by his own memory but by that of his mother-in-law to visit Shiloh with Norma Jean. Leroy, for whom the present has become evacuated of history, anticipates that this National Historical Site, the Civil War battleground in Tennessee, “would look like a golf course.” He tries to impress Norma Jean and to dull his own pain with disconnected facts about the battle, but “they both know that he doesn't know any history” (14). Mason describes how, as Leroy hears Norma Jean telling him she wants to leave him, his gaze takes in the Shiloh cemetery. Mason's setting of this dialogue at the scene of “that darkest place in Southern history, where 24,000 soldiers were wounded, and 3,500 of them died in battle,”¹⁵ invites the reader to reflect on the legacy of the past, and specifically on the effect on the Moffitts' marriage of their inability to mourn together their own dead. But for Leroy the unconfronted past returns to the literal details of a barely interpreted present: “The cemetery, a green slope dotted with white markers, looks like a subdivision site. Leroy is trying to comprehend that his marriage is breaking up, but for some reason he is wondering about white slabs in a graveyard” (15). However, as he tries to form a narrative that connects random facts about the battle to the marriage of his parents-in-law and to his own marriage, Leroy approaches an epiphany precisely in his recognition that “he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history. History was always just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him” (16).

The outcome of Leroy's revelation is left inconclusive. The closing image sequence presents Leroy trying to “hobble toward” a distant Norma Jean. With poignant humor that hesitates between the metaphoric and the literal, the revelatory and the banal, Mason describes how Norma Jean turns toward Leroy “and waves her arms. Is she beckoning him? She seems to be doing an exercise for her chest muscles. The sky is unusually pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed” (16). Through these concluding images, Mason evokes both the ambiguity of Norma Jean's gesture and the irresolution of Leroy's response to it. His observation that “the sky is unusually pale” suggests how for Leroy, in his shock, the world has become drained of color, while Mason's final, flattened image of the “dust-ruffle” evokes Leroy's desire to avert pain by returning his perception to the familiar and domestic detail. At the same time, the selection of this particular detail is also inscribed with his sense of loss. Through these images Mason sustains a delicate equilibrium between the possibility that Leroy is recognizing that loss or that he is denying it.

In the next story, “The Rookers,” Mason again explores her characters' responses to “culture shock,” sustaining her sympathetic focus on the apprehensive response to change of a male character, Mack Skaggs. Change is most acutely felt by Mary Lou and Mack Skaggs through the dispersal of their family, particularly through the departure of their youngest daughter for college. In her daughter's absence, Mary Lou enjoys a new ritualized connection through her meetings with her widowed friends to play Rook. She is also adjusting to popular culture, enjoying an “R-rated movie,” for example. She observes how her husband, however, whom “the highway … makes nervous,” is retreating into the security of his carpentry workshop. Like Leroy Moffitt, Mack Skaggs is trying to create order in a changing world through craftsmanship. Mary Lou observes how the card table that Mack has made out of pieces of scrap pine seems to express his desire to form a whole out of the fragments of his life: “It seemed that Mack was trying to put together the years of their marriage into a convincing whole and this was as far as he got” (18). Mack retreats further from the workshop in his basement to the television in his den. From the safety of his home, Mack tries to adjust to the changes that are invading it by reading the books that he believes his daughter Judy is studying. Judy's attempt to explain quantum mechanics to her parents provides the central metaphor of the story: “‘If you separate them [photons], they disappear. They don't even exist except in a group’” (27). Shortly afterward, Mary Lou reflects: “If you break up a group, the individuals could disappear out of existence.” She is afraid that her husband “is disappearing like that, disconnected from everybody” (29). This metaphor resonates throughout the collection of stories, evoking the characters' fear as they feel themselves becoming increasingly isolated as familiar social structures appear to disintegrate. Mack Skaggs tries to both forge a controlled connection with the world outside his home and to regulate the information entering it, undermining former certainties, by constantly calling the weather report on the telephone. The story concludes with Mary Lou's realization that “Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn't have to reply. It's his way of pretending that he's involved. He wants it to snow so that he won't have to go outside. He is afraid of what might happen.” Mary Lou continues to reflect that what her husband “must really be afraid of is women,” which makes her feel “so sick and heavy with her power over him that she wants to cry” (33). This unexpected shift in the narrative's exploration of change aligns the story with “Shiloh” and others in the collection, implicitly identifying the recent alteration of gender roles as perhaps the most powerful cause of cultural dislocation. The final image is of Mack standing “in a frozen pose,” paralyzed by the changes that invade his household.

Mason explores the effect of contemporary cultural shifts on family life in three other stories, “Old Things,” “Drawing Names,” and “Graveyard Day.” In “Old Things” Cleo Watkins has to some extent accepted personal change, selling her farm, moving to a new house in town, and giving away reminders of her deceased husband. She is distressed, however, by her daughter's arrival with her two children after she has left her husband. While her daughter tells Cleo that “you could go to school, make a nurse,” Cleo tries to instill in her daughter traditional values with such advice as “a man takes care of a woman” (80). To Cleo her daughter's tales of her marital breakdown seem as strange as though “she has been told some wild tale about outer space, like something on a TV show” (80). The story depicts Cleo trying to reconcile what she felt to be a harmonious past rooted in traditional family values with a rapidly changing present, in order to imagine an acceptable future. Yet she does not believe that the past can be repossessed through the current fashion for commodifying former ways of life. She has no sympathy with her daughter's taste for “antiquing” the “paraphernalia” of farm life and is shocked when she sees farmers selling now unused farm objects at a local market.

At the end of the story, however, she finds at the market “a miniature Early American whatnot” that she recognizes as one she had given away. The picture on the whatnot of “a train running through a meadow” stimulates a reverie that provides the concluding images of the story. Cleo imagines the train “gliding … out West” with her remaining family aboard: “Cleo is following unafraid in the caboose, as the train passes through the golden meadow and they all wave at the future and smile perfect smiles” (93). These images are ambiguous in their evocation of a fantasy of the future based on the projection of a nostalgic longing for the past, which denies change and the disharmony that it has produced. Yet at the same time they, like Cleo's purchase of the whatnot, suggest that she can become more accepting of a recent past about which she has felt some guilt, having believed that her husband “would never forgive her for selling the farm” (90).

In “Graveyard Day,” which was included in Best American Short Stories of 1983 and Pushcart Prize VIII: Best of the Small Presses, Mason again explores the effect of cultural changes upon shifting family relationships. The story traces the increasing anxiety of Waldeen, whose ex-husband has left for Arizona. Waldeen reflects that if she were to marry her new lover, Joe McClain, her daughter would have a stepfather, “something like a sugar substitute,” but, Waldeen feels, “families shouldn't shift memberships, like clubs. But here they are, trying to be a family” (167). Waldeen is also sensitive to other changes, wrought largely through the influx of new ideas, which make themselves felt through generational differences. This is evident even in that most domestic of rituals, preparing food: while “Waldeen is tenderizing liver. … Her daughter insists that she is a vegetarian. If Holly had said Rosicrucian it would have sounded just as strange to Waldeen” (165).

In this story, however, unusually in the increasingly “Americanized” South evoked by Mason, tradition has been preserved through a particular ritual: Joe McClain tells Waldeen how each spring he maintains a family ritual by raking over his grandparents' grave and placing geraniums there. Waldeen suggests that she and her daughter accompany Joe on a picnic to the graveyard while he undertakes this ritual. As in “Shiloh,” a visit to a graveyard allows the characters to reflect on the losses borne in contemporary cultural changes. Waldeen's anxiety is manifested in her increasing morbidity throughout this scene. Approaching the graveyard, she compares Joe's geraniums to “a petrified Easter basket” and imagines “that they were in a funeral procession” (174). Thoughts of love, marriage, and death merge as Waldeen imagines that “the burial plot, not a diamond ring, symbolizes the promise of marriage” (177).

Whereas in “Shiloh,” however, Leroy and Norma Jean Moffitt lack a ritual through which to acknowledge and mourn together the loss of their son and the disintegration of their marriage, Waldeen's observation of Joe's continuance of a family ritual seems to help her to begin to cohere the fragments that she feels constitute her life. The morbid analogies she has been nurturing give way to a memory of being on a pedal boat on a lake with a former boyfriend. As they had spent the entire afternoon there, her boyfriend had “worked Saturdays … to pay for their spree.” Waldeen recalls that in a recent encounter, he had told her that “it was worth it, for it was one of the great adventures of his life, going out on a pedal boat with Waldeen, with nothing but the lake and time” (177–8). This memory leads to the concluding images of the narrative: “Waldeen has pulled her shoes off. Then she is taking a long running start, like a pole vaulter, and then with a flying leap she lands in the immense pile of leaves, up to her elbows.” Waldeen, whom Joe McClain has reproached with being “afraid to do anything new,” has been prompted by her memory of a small but “great adventure” to act recklessly. As in the concluding images of many of Mason's stories, optimism is implicit in her momentary embrace of change.

Family ritual also provides the lens through which Mason examines the effect of change in “Drawing Names.” The protagonist, Carolyn Sisson, has returned to her parents' home for Christmas Day. The title of the story draws attention to the family's need to improvise a new ritual in response to changing circumstances: members of the family must draw names to determine the recipient of their Christmas gift. Carolyn reflects that she herself “could not afford to buy fifteen presents on her salary as a clerk at J. C. Penney's, and her parents' small farm had not been profitable in years” (95). Through her representation of the social microcosm of a family Christmas, Mason subtly explores the changes that are exerting pressure on a family whose relations have been altered by dispersal, separation, and divorce. The effects of feminism are again presented as one of the major sources of change. This is exemplified by a brief exchange that is typical of Mason's finely attuned use of dialogue to offer a pithy insight into the conjunction of characters' emotions with cultural circumstance. As most of the male members of the family hurry to finish the Christmas dinner so they can watch the television, the grandfather remarks “Use to, the menfolks would eat first, and the children separate. The womenfolks would eat last, in the kitchen.” One of his granddaughters comments that “times are different now. … We're just as good as the men,” to which the husband from whom she is separating remarks, “She gets that from television” (104).¹⁶ Other social changes are lightly alluded to as the family discusses, bemused, the “black Barbie doll” that was given as a Christmas present to a friend of one of Carolyn's nieces. The introduction of change is most marked by the presence of the Northern outsider, Jim Walsh, with whom Carolyn's younger sister, Laura Jean, is “stacking up.” Other members of the family respond with circumspection to the educated Jim, as class difference is evinced by his introduction of unfamiliar knowledge into the conversation at the dinner table. This is again evoked by Mason through a poignant moment of dialogue as Jim responds to the father's labored joke about monks with the earnest observation that “The Trappist Monks are a really outstanding group. … And they make excellent bread. No preservatives” (103).

These changes are observed by Carolyn as she awaits the arrival of her own boyfriend, Kent Ballard. Carolyn's realization that he is not going to keep his appointment with her family, having gone to see his boat instead, leads to a series of recognitions that enable her to begin to accept some of the changes that she and her family have found painful. As in “Old Things,” this story ends with a fantasy that draws together the threads of the narrative in an ameliorative movement, even if it does not offer resolution. The story concludes with Carolyn looking at the box of the bottle of bourbon that Jim has brought as a gift, to be warily received by the family as a confirmation of his unwelcome disruption of their own traditions. The box “showed an old-fashioned scene, children on sleds in the snow,” which prompts “Carolyn to think of Kent's boat again. She felt she was in that snowy scene now with Laura Jean and Jim, sailing in Kent's boat into the winter breeze, into falling snow. She thought of how silent it was out on the lake, as though the whiteness of the snow were the absence of sound” (108). While the significance of the silence and whiteness in Carolyn's fantasy remains indeterminate, the presence of Laura Jean and Jim on the boat with her suggests the healing of certain rifts. Throughout the Christmas celebrations, Carolyn has regarded her sister's boyfriend with envious circumspection, until a brief exchange with him has revealed his sensitivity to her own predicament and his commitment to her sister. Prior to the concluding fantasy, Carolyn has “wondered what [Laura Jean and Jim] said to each other when they were alone in St. Louis. She knew they would not be economical with words, like the monks in the story. She longed to be with them, to hear what they would say” (107). Following upon this reflection, the concluding images suggest that Carolyn is reaching an acceptance of what has now become her past, as the fantasy incorporates Kent's boat but not Kent, while she also envisions sailing into an unknown future with people who have embraced departure and change.

In “Offerings” Mason describes Sandra Lee's search for a romanticized rural past, having moved into an isolated country home following the departure of her husband for Louisville, where he works at a K Mart. The story tells of a visit by Sandra's mother and paternal grandmother to Sandra's home. Sandra “presses Grandmother to talk about the past, to tell about the farm Sandra can barely remember,” (56) and she tells her visitors that she is collecting “duck expressions” such as “lucky duck,” “set your ducks in a row,” and “sitting duck” (55–56). Grandmother Stamper is not, however, nostalgic about farm life: after spending five years nursing her dying husband on a “dying farm,” she has remarried, has moved into a city apartment, and “has more shoes than places to go.” She observes to Sandra: “I declare … you have moved plumb out into the wilderness” (54).

Away from the close scrutiny of her grandmother and the dominating masculinity of her husband who, Sandra believes, wants her to spend weekends with him “watching go-go dancers in smoky bars” and whom she expects to return for his hunting rifle, Sandra has taken a defiant pride in neglecting herself and her house. In a flat, controlled tone, which heightens by contrast the abnegation of control that she is describing, Mason notes how “Sandra never dusts,” despite her grandmother's warning that if she didn't, “the dust bunnies would … multiply and take over,” and she “has not mowed in three weeks.” However, there are signs of the menace of the wilderness, and of Sandra's defenselessness against it: a missing cat may have been shot and a bird she tried to rescue from another cat “died in her hand” and is on a stump, “untouched since yesterday” (53). More worryingly, perhaps, although it is late summer, Sandra has not made any preparations for winter, letting her woodpile get low and failing to insulate the attic or repair a leak in the basement.

Underlying Sandra's apparent nonchalance about the encroachment of the wilderness is a fear of the invasion of the body, particularly the female body, by pain, illness, and death, when preventative action is not taken. The story opens with Sandra reflecting on the death of her maternal grandmother “of childbed fever at the age of twenty-six.” She then recalls how her mother “developed an infection but was afraid to see the doctor,” insisting “it would go away.” Years later, her mother experienced “inexplicable pains,” and she recalls her mother's gruesome account of the operation that followed: “Through blurred eyes, she could see a red expanse below her waist. It resembled the Red Sea parting …” (53). Her mother's hysterectomy becomes one of several secrets kept between the women of the family: Sandra's mother has never told her mother-in-law about it, nor, for twenty-five years, about the fact that she smokes, and she now warns Sandra to protect Grandmother Stomper from the knowledge that Sandra's husband has left. The morbidity aroused by these feminine secrets haunts Sandra as she enjoys the temporary womanly community afforded by her relatives' visit: the tomato soup she has prepared resembles “bowls of blood,” and she glimpses on the television “a star formed by women, with spread legs, lying on their backs in the water” (58–9).

Through the images of the concluding sequence of the story, Mason subtly draws its themes together and gives them an unexpected twist. As Sandra accompanies her mother outside for her to smoke a secret cigarette, she dispassionately recalls how yesterday her cats ate a mole, starting with its nose, “like a delicacy.” Her next memories of the feral nature of the wild are oddly nuanced, however. Threatening savagery is turned into choreographed beauty as Sandra recalls the “menacing yaps” of foxes at night and then how fox cubs playing in the moonlight resembled “dancers in a spotlight.” She remembers how “she heard a baby screaming in terror,” a cry that she recognized to be that of a wildcat. This sound has become “a thrill she listens for every night,” suggesting that Sandra herself is developing an increasingly feral pleasure in wildlife. These images culminate in Sandra's reflection that “she would not mind if the wildcat took her ducks. They are her offering” (59). This open-ended statement gives one pause to wonder whether Sandra desires to propitiate the wilderness without or within her, a wildness which she both fears and desires.

The concluding images extends this ambiguity: “The night is peaceful, and Sandra thinks of the thousands of large golden garden spiders hidden in the field. In the early morning the dew shines on their trampolines, and she can imagine bouncing with an excited spring from web to web, all the way up the hill to the woods” (59). The tranquil beauty evoked by the first image is disturbed by the metamorphosis of Sandra that occurs through the predatory exuberance of her identification with the spiders. Albert Wilhelm has observed that this passage has been interpreted as “beautifully” and “positively” offering “a metaphor for connections among women (especially mother and daughter) that illustrates their power to sustain each other in times of crisis.”¹⁷ Wilhelm argues, however, that this reading “overlooks the ominous overtones of this elaborate fairy-tale image. In the spiderweb conceit, Sandra sees herself moving not toward social involvement but deeper into the lonely woods. Furthermore, her means of getting there is frail and insubstantial. Instead of bouncing her to ever greater heights, the flimsy webs would surely break and cling.” Wilhelm concludes that “Sandra is more caught in a web than soaring above it.”¹⁸ This reading is a perceptive response to the ambiguities that pervade the imagery of the story. The “woods” that Sandra perceives as a welcoming retreat from the social relations that have constricted or hurt her do indeed, as in fairy-tales, also connote to the reader a wilderness where she may find herself abandoned to both exterior and interior untrammeled nature.

In “Nancy Culpepper” Mason explores her eponymous protagonist's attempts to integrate the past with the present. The story tells of Nancy's return to her parents' home as they are about to move her grandmother into a nursing home. Nancy has moved to Pennsylvania after attending graduate school and marrying Jack Cleveland, “a Yankee,” in Massachusetts. Having felt exiled throughout her years in the North, she has now become preoccupied with recovering some family photographs she believes to be hidden in a closet in her grandmother's home. Mason vividly evokes Nancy's sense of culture shock as she was initiated into Northern middle-class culture through her description of Nancy's memories of her wedding. Nancy recalls how, after persuading her parents not to attend the wedding, she felt only alienation and homesickness. This is accentuated by the icons of 1960s counter-culture that mark the occasion, such as “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” playing “instead of organ music” and a chain-smoking minister whom the preachers of her childhood “would have called a heathen.” “Dope” and a “wine-and-7Up punch” are served for refreshments, their heady insubstantiality contrasting with what Nancy thinks her parents might be eating for supper: “Possibly fried steak, two kinds of peas, biscuits, blackberry pie” (182). The wedding photographs turn out to be “trick photography,” which underscores Nancy's sense of the inauthenticity of the ritual when separated from the traditions that would have conferred significance on it in the culture of her childhood. As Nancy dances with her husband to the Beatles record, she laments: “There aren't any stopping places. … Songs used to have stopping places in between” (182). Nancy's return to Kentucky to find her grandmother's photographs becomes a search for a place in which to pause and reflect on the changes that have transformed her life and culture.¹⁹

On an earlier return to Kentucky, Nancy finds that her acquisition of middle-class tastes has estranged her from the landscape of her childhood. She believes that, divested of the value that labor, familiarity, and memory would confer upon it, the landscape would seem merely a quaint composition. Nancy imagines that Jack “was seeing peaceful landscapes—arrangements of picturesque cows, an old red barn. She had never thought of the place this way before; it reminded her of prints in a dime store” (184). To Nancy, Jack's photographs denaturalize Nature by turning it into Art, as he composes still-life images out of “common” things such as “stumps, puffballs, tree roots, close-ups of cat feet” (186).

Nancy's return to her childhood home to find the photograph of her namesake becomes an attempt to recover her connection to the past. Her earlier discovery of the inscription NANCY CULPEPPER, 1833–1905 on a tombstone in a local cemetery seemed like “time-lapse photography. … I was standing there looking into the past and future at the same time. It was weird” (186–7). In her sense of standing on a threshold, at a point of transition between past and future, Nancy epitomizes many of Mason's women characters. At present, Nancy prefers to look to the past to secure her identity, and since discovering the existence of her great-great-aunt, she has started using her maiden name. When she finds a wedding photograph of the woman she believes to be her namesake, Nancy recognizes in her a precursor whose conflicting longings anticipate her own, but who would be able to embrace the future: “This young woman would be glad to dance to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away” (195).

Nancy Culpepper reappears in the next story of the collection, “Lying Doggo,” where the dying of her husband's dog, Grover, seems to mark “a milestone” in “a marriage that has somehow lasted almost fifteen years” (198). This story extends the themes of “Nancy Culpepper” as it traces Nancy's reflections on the tensions caused in her marriage by the initial class differences between herself and her husband, which are caricatured in Nancy's observation to Jack that “You educated me. I was so out of it when I met you. One day I was listening to Hank Williams and shelling corn for the chickens and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what” (207).

In each of these stories, Mason's protagonists are adapting to the changes that occur as familiar traditions of rural life in western Kentucky are being replaced by the images and ideology introduced by consumer culture. In the stories Mason shows how the process of adaptation is a gradual one, attained through moments of recognition in which the past is brought to bear on the interpretation of the present. This process is inscribed with a sense of what is being lost and often generates anxiety and fear, but, as Mason shows, individual and cultural identities may be tentatively renewed through it. The characters' assimilation to an “Americanizing” consumer culture is imitated by Mason's style, with its naturalization of references to consumer products. In some of the stories, however, consumer culture retains its strangeness as Mason uses defamiliarizing techniques to emphasize the apparently incongruous juxtaposition of the values embedded in past traditions with the ideology imparted by the images and artifacts of consumer culture. Linda Adams Barnes has suggested that Mason's revelation of the incongruity of this juxtaposition adds an element of the grotesque to her work, which locates it in a tradition of Southern grotesque descending from Flannery O'Connor. She argues that although inherent in O'Connor's use of the grotesque is a faith that assumes “the possibility of grace,” a faith that has largely disappeared from the world evoked by Mason, Mason's stories also imply a moral vision through the “instructiveness” of her “dramatization” of the conflict between “traditional Southern life and encroaching modern life.”²⁰ This effect of grotesqueness that unsettles the spare surface created by the precise, literal details of dirty realist writing has also been described as “a kind of surrealism of the everyday.”²¹

One story that emphasizes the strangeness of the everyday is “Detroit Skyline, 1949.” This story is an anomaly in the collection in that it is told by a first-person narrator (“Residents and Transients” is the only other example of this) and the events of the story take place in a Northern industrial city in 1949 rather than in Mason's usual setting of contemporary Kentucky. The narrator is recalling a journey she made as a nine-year-old girl to visit relatives in Detroit. Mason's use of a first-person narrator allows her to create an impression of interiority that contrasts with most of the stories, where she allusively infers her characters' states of mind through the evocation of their perception of external details, as recounted by a third-person narrator.²² Her use of a child's point of view also enables her to defamiliarize the “reality” to which adults become inured.²³ By setting the story in the post—World War II period, Mason historicizes some of the changes that her other stories represent, particularly as much of her narrator's sense of wonder and disorientation is aroused by the commodities that she is encountering for the first time. The narrative frame of a journey from western Kentucky to Detroit (a reversal of most of the journeys undertaken in Mason's stories) focuses the conflict between rural and urban culture that is to become more complex and pervasive in the contemporary world of Mason's other stories.

Peggy Jo learns from fragments of her aunt's and uncle's conversation that the Detroit in which she has arrived with her mother is darkened by people's fear of “reds” and immobilized by a bus strike caused by “trouble with the unions.” Against this backdrop, Peggy Jo is fascinated by such “strange” manifestations of consumer culture as a “toaster, a Mixmaster,” an advertisement of “a fabulous life with Fab,” and a “Toni doll … with a Play Wave, including plastic spin curlers and Toni Creme Rinse” (44). Most fascinating and astonishing of all, she finds, is the television, which begins to permeate her imagination. The cultural collision between North and South evinced by the child's response to these commodities is immediately interpreted by her Detroit relatives as a class difference, the result of being “raised with a bunch of country hicks” (38). The child's sense of the strangeness of the everyday reality of life in Detroit is amplified by her aunt's scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, which “included household hints and cradle notes, but most of the stories were about bizarre occurrences around the world—diseases and kidnappings and disasters.” Her aunt explains: “Life is amazing. I keep these to remind me of just how strange everything is” (42). To the adult, in contrast with the child, the defamiliarization of the quotidian only occurs when extremity or anomaly reveals its “bizarreness.” Mason's adult characters generally adjust to the intrusion of the unfamiliar in their lives by assimilating it to the familiar, which involves a denial of differences. Mason's mimetic representation of this process through a preponderance of similes and metonymy over metaphor creates the “flattening” effect of her writing. The stories invented by Peggy Jo, however, exemplify a child's desire to find narratives that explain both the differences and the connections between things. These narratives necessarily become metaphoric as layers of “reality,” imagined and literal, cultural and “natural,” are interpreted through each other. For example, Peggy Jo's familiar world is further unsettled when her mother, who has been taken to hospital, explains to her that she has “lost” a baby. The child forms a narrative to try and understand what has happened: “That night, alone in the pine-and-cedar room, I saw everything clearly, like the sharpened images that floated on the television screen. My mother had said an egg didn't hatch, but I knew better. The reds had stolen the baby. They took things. They were after my aunt's copper-bottomed pans. They stole the butter. They wanted my uncle's job. They were invisible, like the guardian angel, although they might wear disguises. You didn't know who might be a red. You never knew when you might lose a baby that you didn't know you had” (50). Peggy Jo's explanatory narrative is a bricolage of fragments of overheard adults' gossip, other children's lore, and the images she has received from the television, radio, and children's books.

On her return journey to the South, the child is seized by the sense of wonder that Mason's adults have largely lost: “I felt—with a new surge of clarity—the mystery of travel, the vastness of the world, the strangeness of life” (51). Momentarily the child fears that her father and brother will not recognize her and her mother when they return, but she is reassured by seeing that “our little white house was still there” (52). To Mason's adults, however, the concept of “home” is always destabilized by departure and return.

Mason explores this theme further in “Still Life with Watermelon,” another story where “reality” is unsettled by elements of the grotesque. Louise Milsap is trying to adjust to the loss of her job and the impulsive departure of her husband to work on a ranch in Texas. Her friend, Peggy, has moved in with her, as her husband has also left “unconscionably.” Peggy seeks a pattern to the apparent randomness of contemporary life, in Harlequin romances and “dreams and coincidences,” and she persuades Louise to paint watermelons in the hope of selling them to a rich, old eccentric who has taken to collecting paintings of watermelons. Louise has tried to accommodate the events that have dramatically altered her life, but if she has managed to suppress a recognition of their untowardness, a sense of strangeness imbues her surreal paintings of watermelons: “the first one she tried looked like a dark-green basketball floating on an algae-covered pond” (60), and others “appear to be optical illusions—watermelons disappearing like black holes into vacant skies” (67). The incongruity between the watermelons and the backgrounds against which she paints them hovers as an image of her own life.

Louise has refused to accompany her husband on his adventure, preferring the safety of “home,” but upon his return she reflects that “Tom is home and she doesn't know what that means” (71). When Herman Priddle is unable to buy her paintings, she realizes that perhaps it is she “who has been off on a crazy adventure” (73). This recognition leads her to connect her own experience to larger social changes: “Something about the conflicting impulses of men and women has gotten twisted around. … She had preached the idea of staying home, but it occurs to her now that perhaps the meaning of home grows out of the fear of open spaces. In some people that fear is so intense that it is a disease …” (73).

Bill and Imogene Crittendon in “The Ocean” have embraced “open spaces,” having sold their farm and bought a camper in which to travel down to Florida. As in “Shiloh” and “Detroit Skyline, 1949,” the journey out of the insularity of their home state prompts the characters to make historical and geographical comparisons—albeit of a fragmentary nature—which are rare among Mason's characters. Bill has initiated the journey so that he may see the ocean for the first time since he was serving on a ship on the Pacific in the Second World War. As he travels down to Florida, Bill is disturbed by nightmares in which various parts of his past coexist alarmingly: “He had a nightmare in which his mother and Imogene sat in rocking chairs on either side of him, having a contest to see who could rock the longest. Bill's job was to keep the score, but they kept on rocking” (161). The “endless rocking” leaves Bill feeling “seasick” and “frightened.” Bill's nightmare is permeated by anxiety about his wife's distress at their strange translation from life on the farm to life on the road. This anxiety is reflected in his confusion about both the past and the present as, finally looking out to sea, he imagines “battleships and destroyers” there and cannot “tell if they were coming or going, or whose they were” (164).

An element of the grotesque, which draws attention to the strangeness of the intersection of contemporary culture with rural traditions, is present in three other stories through Mason's representation of women's illnesses.²⁴ In “The Climber,” “The Retreat,” and “Third Monday” Mason depicts women whose illnesses draw attention to their confinement in their bodies. This occurs in a culture that isolates them through the “disembodiment” of its media of communication, such as the telephone, television, and information technology. Bodily confinement serves as a figure for the way in which Mason's characters are enclosed within their culture, despite the proliferation of media of communication, and feel unable to actively connect with historical changes. In these stories this confinement is gendered, as men provide images of a freedom that still seems unavailable to the women.

“The Climber” tells of Dolores, who is waiting to keep an appointment with a doctor about what she fears is breast cancer. Dolores's sense that possibilities for her are restricted by her body is contrasted with the images of masculine transcendence that open the story. Dolores is watching an interview with an astronaut on “the Christian channel”: “The former astronaut claims that walking on the moon was nothing, compared to walking with Jesus …” (109). These images of escape from bodily limitation lead to another, closer to home, as Dolores watches a tree-cutter at work in her yard. The tree-cutter takes risks, Dolores observes, “as though to fall would be incidental” (118). By contrast, Dolores feels immured in her body by her fear about her illness and spends her time talking on the telephone to her friend who has had a catalogue of illnesses. Dolores reflects that “whenever women get together, they talk about diseases. Men never do” (110). This contrast is underscored for the reader by an implied simile: while Dolores lies on the doctor's examination table, the tree “filled with plump green buds” is cut down. Although she is relieved to discover that her symptoms are benign, she, like Louise Milsap in “Still Life with Watermelon,” feels bereft of her own sense of adventure. She “somehow felt cheated. She wonders what it would take to make a person want to walk with the Lord, a feeling that would be greater than walking on the moon” (120).

A similarly grotesque conjunction of images occurs in “The Retreat,” which tells of a moment of crisis in the marriage of Georgeann and Shelby Pickett, a part-time evangelical preacher. Georgeann's increasing sense of disorientation is manifested in symptoms that could have been caused by the mites of a sick chicken. She expresses her unhappiness at a retreat that she has reluctantly attended with her husband, as she asks: “What do you do if the man you're married to … turns out to be the wrong one for you?” When her question falls on deaf ears, Georgeann retreats to the basement, where she starts playing video games. These, she discovers, enable her to project herself into a virtual space beyond the confines of her body and her marriage: “The situation is dangerous and thrilling, but Georgeann feels in control. She isn't running away; she is chasing the aliens” (145). She responds to Shelby's perplexity about her new pastime with the explanation: “You forget everything but who you are … Your mind leaves your body” (146). This experience seems purgative, enabling Georgeann to make the decision not to accompany her husband when he moves to another church. The ending is ambiguous, however, suggesting that Georgeann's beheading of the sick chicken may be either a further act of excision or a resumption of her former role of dutiful wife: “When the ax crashes blindly down on its neck, Georgeann feels nothing, only that she has done her duty” (147).

“Third Monday” opens with an image of both women's freedom from former social control of their sexuality and their continued circumscription within the body. Ruby, who has undergone a radical mastectomy, is participating in a celebration that is “an amazing baby shower because Linda is thirty-seven and unmarried” (232). Ruby herself is enjoying an unconventional relationship with Buddy Landon, whom she sees only on the third Monday of each month, as he travels “the flea-market circuit” selling dogs. While Buddy's transience allows Ruby a certain freedom, her cancer seemed to have a grotesque “presence of its own,” “interfering” with her actions and choices “like a nosy neighbor.” Ruby's adjustment to the loss of both her breast and Buddy, whom she learns is in jail, is evoked through a transfigurative pattern of images. In the concluding scene Mason describes how Ruby meets a man who is visiting the clinic for a “brain test”: “The man picks up a magazine and says, ‘this is my baby.’ He hugs the magazine and rocks it in his arms. His broad smile curves like the crescent phase of the moon” (247). Ruby's sense of both loss and optimism is evoked by this final image. At one level it is a grotesque transformation of the story's opening image of the celebration of Linda's unborn child and it also alludes to Ruby's bodily loss. However, the moon has also been associated with Ruby's sense of freedom as she looked at it with Buddy and later, recovering, albeit with a sense of loss, from her operation, noted that “Everything is round and full now, like the moon” (242).

In “A New-Wave Format” Mason again explores the possibility of transforming the present by revisiting the past. Edwin Creech, who is in his early forties, has begun a relationship with the twenty-year-old Sabrina and has started a new job, driving a bus for “mentally retarded adults.” As he becomes aware of the different values he and Sabrina hold, Edwin begins to reflect on his life. He realizes that “he still feels like the same person, unchanged, that he was twenty years ago” (215). Edwin feels that the historical events of the Sixties, the period of his youth, did not directly touch him. By contrast, he now feels a new excitement as he tries to protect the delicate equilibrium of the passengers on his bus: “Edwin has to stay alert, for anything could happen. The guys who came back from Vietnam said it was like this every moment. Edwin was in the army, but he was never sent to Vietnam, and now he feels that he has bypassed some critical stage in his life: a knowledge of terror” (217). He realizes that his immersion in the popular culture of television and radio has acted as a kind of opiate, dissociating him from the events in his life that might have produced strong emotions. He reflects that “he used to think of himself as an adventurer, but now he realizes that he has gone through his life rather blindly, without much pain or sense of loss” (216). However, as he plays Sixties music to his passengers, “music that now seems full of possibility: the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, groups with vision,” Edwin listens to it with a new understanding. For Edwin, unlike many of Mason's characters, listening again to the music of his past enables him to create “a bridge from the past to the present, spanning those empty years—his marriages, the turbulence of the times—and connecting his youth solidly with his present” (228). The healing effect of integrating the music of the past with his present circumstances is contrasted with the effect of the “new-wave format,” the contemporary music that Sabrina persuades Edwin to play to his passengers on the bus: “The frenetic beat was a perfect expression of their aimlessness and frustration” (228). The “grotesque” confinement of his passengers in the frenetic beat of the present moment is highlighted when one of them has a seizure. Edwin himself, however, feels that he has overcome a “developmental disability” by revisiting the past. Through his newly compassionate perception, it becomes not the passengers on the bus who are grotesque (as they are to Sabrina) but the dislocations between the various moments of his life and the abandonment to a disconnected present that is expressed in the “frantic beat” of the music of the “new-wave format.”²⁵ In its exploration of a character's attempt to integrate the legacy of the 1960s with the present moment in order to reach a new understanding of himself and his culture, this story anticipates the central theme of Mason's … In Country.

Notes

1. Robert Towers, “American Graffiti,” New York Times Book Review, 16 December 1982, 39.

2. Anne Tyler, “Kentucky Cameos,” New Republic 187, no. 1 (1 November 1982): 38.

3. Tyler, “Kentucky Cameos,” 38.

4. Bobbie Ann Mason, “A Conversation with Bobbie Ann Mason,” ed. David Y. Todd, Boulevard 4–5.3–1 (Spring 1990): 135, quoted by Andrew Levy in The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 112.

5. Lila Havens, “Residents and Transients: An Interview with Bobbie Ann Mason,” Crazyhorse 29 (Fall 1985): 88.

6. Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story, 112.

7. Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story, 113.

8. Robert Dunn, “Fiction that Shrinks From Life,” New York Times Book Review, 30 June 1985, 13, 24, 25.

9. John Barth, “A Few Words About Minimalism,” New York Times Book Review, 28 Dec 1986; and Ben Yagoda, “No Tense Like the Present,” New York Times Book Review, 10 Aug 1986.

10. Yagoda, “No Tense Like the Present,” 30.

11. Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh, and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 121. All parenthetical citations for Shiloh, and Other Stories are from this edition.

12. Terry Thompson, “Mason's ‘Shiloh,’” Explicator 54, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 55.

13. Mason, Nabokov's Garden: A Guide to Ada (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1974), 143.

14. See Barbara Henning's reading of this passage in “Minimalism and the American Dream: ‘Shiloh’ by Bobbie Ann Mason and ‘Preservation’ by Raymond Carver,” Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 691.

15. Bobbie Ann Mason, Midnight Magic (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1998), xi.

16. See Darlene Reimers Hill's discussion of the connection between food, ritual, and gender in this story in “‘Use To, the Menfolks Would Eat First’: Food and Food Rituals in the Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason,” Southern Quarterly 30, no. 2–3 (Winter-Spring 1992): 85–87.

17. Albert Wilhelm, Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne-Prentice Hall, 1998), 50. Wilhelm is referring to Tina Bucher, “Changing Roles and Finding Stability: Women in Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh, and Other Stories,” Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association 8 (1991): 54.

18. Wilhelm, Bobbie Ann Mason, 50.

19. See Reimers Hill's interpretation of this scene in “‘Use to, the Menfolks Would Eat First,’” 85.

20. Linda Adams Barnes, “The Freak Endures: The Southern Grotesque from Flannery O'Connor to Bobbie Ann Mason,” in Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays On The Contemporary American Short Story, ed. Loren Logsden and Charles W. Mayer (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1987), 133–41.

21. Duncan Webster, Looka Yonder! The Imaginary America of Populist Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 116.

22. Mason has described how she writes by starting with a surface detail or line of dialogue to trigger getting inside a character or situation in Havens, “Residents and Transients,” 97.

23. Mason has remarked of Nabokov that “his extraordinary childhood allowed him to indulge a child's way of seeing that's up close and particular”; Lyons and Oliver, “An Interview with Bobbie Ann Mason,” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 461. In her article “The Elements of E. B. White's style,” Language Arts 56, no. 6 (Sept. 1979): 693, Mason also expressed her admiration of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, in which White “asks adults to renew their sense of wonder, and he asks children to try to understand the nature of reality.”

24. See Barnes, “The Freak Endures,” 140.

25. See Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr.'s discussion of this story in “Finding One's History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature,” Southern Literary Journal 19, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 26–27.