Stephen who is ‘‘one of those Yankees who are moving into this region with increasing frequency, a fact which disturbs the native residents.’’ Mary, however, ‘‘would not have called Stephen a Yankee,’’ once again revealing her reluctance to classify people or ideas. Mason also divides financial matters and property owners into two groups as well. There are those who prefer ‘‘liquid assets,’’ like Stephen, and those who prefer to bury their money in the land, both literally and figuratively. That is, there are those who choose to borrow money to buy property, leaving their cash available for other uses, and those who do not believe in debt, like Mary’s parents.

A less obvious contrast in the story is between verbal and non-verbal communication. Stephen is a master of words. Not only does he sell wordprocessors for a living, he ‘‘processes’’ words when he and Mary talk on the phone or when they visit the financial counselor. His communication is strictly verbal; words are his business and his life. Larry, ironically, who ‘‘overhauls’’ mouths for a living, says very little. He is reticent, quiet and discreet. Again, Mary seems caught in the middle; she is ‘‘incoherent’’ when she speaks to Stephen on the phone, and she falls silent. However, she is also the narrator of the story, the one who relates to the reader what happens. Thus, while she does not ‘‘process’’ words in her conversation with Stephen, she nonetheless is a word processor, someone who links words together to tell a story.

The most important dichotomy in the story, however, is that between childhood and adulthood. There are many clues to suggest that Mary is attempting to return to her childhood. Her allusion to the poem ‘‘Fern Hill’’ by Dylan Thomas underscores this desire. In ‘‘Fern Hill,’’ Thomas recalls his own ‘‘green’’ childhood, with longing and nostalgia. Furthermore, Mary is at the moment of transition when she will need to move away from childhood and into adulthood, with all the responsibilities and cares that such a move entails. She is fearful and resistant to making the change. When the story opens, the reader finds that Mary has moved back to Kentucky, to her childhood home, to care for her failing parents. Yet her parents leave Kentucky shortly thereafter to live in Florida, leaving Mary metaphorically orphaned. Their absence, however, signals that it is Mary’s turn to take on the responsibility of a household.

Perhaps less obvious, but no less important, is the implication that it is time for Mary to start a family of her own. Certainly, Stephen’s search for a home suggests his need to settle down and start a family. Mary’s resistance to not only moving to Louisville but also to even visiting Stephen seems to symbolize a deeply rooted fear of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood.

There are many clues pointing in this direction. First, Mary has directed her own maternal instincts toward the cats. She says, ‘‘They seem to be my responsibility, like some sins I have committed, like illegitimate children.’’ It would be possible to argue that the sin is her failure to procreate, to carry on her family line. Second, her affair with Larry is essentially immature, as evidenced by Mason’s description of them as children. The first time he comes to the house, Larry brings ice cream and drives a truck with ‘‘a chrome streak on it that makes it look like a rocket, and on the doors it has flames painted.’’ While such a truck might be appropriate for a teenager out to see his girlfriend, it seems less appropriate for a divorced dentist pursuing an adulterous affair. Larry does not call her Mary, but Mary Sue, her childhood name. They play Monopoly, and go to eat at a restaurant ‘‘where you choose your food from pictures on a wall.’’

Certainly, nothing in this relationship suggests that two adults are involved. The most obvious absence in the story is any mention of sex. Although Mary and Larry are lovers, the only reference Mary makes to their lovemaking is to note that the ‘‘Cats march up and down the bed while we are in it.’’ There are other subtle clues that Mary fears both sex and pregnancy; in some cases, Mason uses phallic symbols to suggest Mary’s apprehension about sexual intimacy. For example, when Larry first comes to the house, he frightens Mary by looking in her mouth. Later, she reports that she will not let him get near her mouth. ‘‘I clamp my teeth shut and grin widely, fighting off imaginary drills.’’

While Mary remains in her parents house, away from Stephen, she can avoid pregnancy and motherhood, even though she seems aware of her own biological clock: ‘‘I am nearly thirty years old. I have two men, eight cats, no cavities.’’

Her own anxiety over pregnancy is further revealed by her description of her cat, Ellen, who had a vaginal infection, lost a litter of kittens because of an x-ray, and eventually had to be spayed. Although Mary does not directly relate her worry over the cat to her own body, she nonetheless writes her parents in great detail. She seems unhappy that they do not respond, as if she wants reassurance from them. In the same paragraph, Mary mentions again the house that Stephen wants to buy, indirectly reminding the reader that playing house and keeping house are two different propositions.

The most graphic image appears near the end of the story. Larry suggests that they break up, asserting that he thinks she is bored with him. Mary does not deny this. When Larry says that he wants her to stay with him, Mary responds, ‘‘I wish it could be that way. . . . I wish that was right.’’ As soon as Mary implies that staying with him is not right, and that she should go to Louisville, they come upon a rabbit, struggling in the road. ‘‘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.’’ Mary seems to identify with the rabbit to such an extent that she is incoherent when her husband calls. Moreover, there is little doubt that the rabbit will die, reminding the reader of an old euphemism for pregnancy. Years ago, when people said, ‘‘The rabbit died,’’ they meant that a woman’s pregnancy test had come back positive.

As the story closes, Mary obliviously shreds the Monopoly money in her hand as she talks to Stephen. Whether or not she will make the next step, from play money to real money, from playing house to keeping house, from illegitimate cats to real babies, is unclear at the end of the story. Like the rabbit, she is caught in the light, neither here nor there, and she waits ‘‘for the light to change.’’

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000. Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College who writes widely on literary topics for educational publishers.

The short story ‘‘Residents and Transients’’ is at the center of her 1983 volume Shiloh and Other Stories for a reason. Mason confirmed the story’s importance in an interview with Wendy Smith in Publisher’s Weekly shortly after the collection appeared. ‘‘‘Residents and Transients’ is a focal point for the main theme of Shiloh and Other Stories, which is the tension between hanging on to the past and racing toward the future’’ (Publisher’s Weekly, 30 August, 1985). The story is significant in its own right—it is a jewel of finely-crafted language and dense symbolic atmosphere and it develops several themes that are fundamental to Mason’s work.

This essay will explore the theme of the tension between the past and future in the story in terms of three symbols—the cats that populate the narrator’s farmhouse, the Monopoly game she plays with her lover, and a half-crushed rabbit they see in the road. It will connect the past/future theme to the one referenced in the story’s title, namely the tension between mobility and rootedness. And it will look at some of the methods Mason uses to bring human emotion and complexity to these matters, which in less talented hands could easily have devolved into impersonal socio-economic musings about the new South.

As is typical of Mason’s economy of language, the first sentence of ‘‘Residents and Transients’’ accomplishes a lot in seventeen words. It introduces the three characters: the narrator Mary, her husband, and her lover. In addition, it presents the story’s general locale, Kentucky—and, by contrast with Louisville, sets up a rural/urban setting polarity.

Furthermore, it establishes the narrator’s oddly passive voice at the outset. She says she is surprised by her own act of having ‘‘taken a lover’’ and seems disconnected from it, at least as she reveals herself to her reader. The rest of the paragraph continues in this vein, introducing Mary’s dilemma—her husband’s involvement in the ‘‘race toward the future’’ (he works for a corporation that keeps him constantly moving in an urban world) and her vacillating desire to ‘‘hang on to the past’’ by staying in the rural area where she grew up.

The tension between the past and future is quickly presented and personified in the two men in the narrator’s life, her husband and her lover. Her husband Stephen is ‘‘one of those Yankees who are moving in;’’ her lover, Larry, is a local she has known since high school. As a ‘‘Yankee’’ and a native Kentuckian respectively, the two represent the North and the South. This distinction remains significant in Bobbie Ann Mason’s contemporary Kentucky because it creates a sense of displacement from 1980s Reagan-era sunbelt America. Mason juxtaposes the local country hicks with people who say ‘‘you guys’’ in a Northern brogue, smoke marijuana, and travel to Europe. Even though the old culture of the ‘‘lost cause’’ South has been overrun by brand names and subdivisions, these locals feel both cut off from their past and unable to connect with the future that is springing up all around them.

The basic polarity of the story is past-Southernrural- simple-resident versus future-Northern-urbansophisticated- transient, and its dramatic core is Mary’s need (but inability) to decide which world to commit to. Her affair with Larry, which she suggests occurred almost without her conscious involvement, is a half- hearted attempt to resist Stephen’s orbit of job changes, word processors, and investment counseling. Yet she is unable to hide her boredom with Larry and his provincial life of ‘‘smocks and drills’’ and quiet contentment. She, after all, is a world traveler who has pursued ‘‘higher learning’’ and was one of the first female porters on the National Limited railroad. He is a rural dentist who drives a Ford Ranger and is obviously much more in love with Mary than she is with him.

The cats that live in Mary’s parents’ old farmhouse constitute the story’s major symbol. These eight felines are connected to Mary symbolically, as Mason makes clear when she has her absent-mindedly include herself when she counts them. She reinforces the connection by having Larry unconsciously link Mary and the cats as well. She has the narrator casually point out that ‘‘Larry strokes a cat with one hand and my hair with the other.’’ Knowing each cat by name, Mary’s character fits nicely with their feline aloofness, their attachment to the farmhouse, and their lack of attachment to anything else.

The cats came with the farm, which places them with the rural past—but they are also cruel to rabbits and homeless cats, which associates them with the ‘‘dog eat dog’’ world of her husband. The cats gang up on transients after initially making them feel at home. After mentioning this cruel feline trait, Mary tells Larry about reading she has done on cat behavior in the wild. The story’s title comes from this passage. The issue Mary ponders regarding cats is the same as her own—namely whether it is better to establish a permanent residence or to commit to being a transient, whether she should stay in her parents’ country farmhouse with Larry or follow her husband into a rootless future of corporate moves and upward mobility.

Mary explains to Larry, who appears to be interested in everything she has to say, that scientists used to think ‘‘resident’’ cat populations that committed to specific territory were the most successful groups in the wild and that the transients were considered ‘‘the bums, the losers.’’ But now this theory has been questioned; the new idea being that maybe the transients are the superior ones, at least the more intelligent. The paradox of all this, of course, is that in Mary’s case being a ‘‘resident’’ would mean leaving her marriage, because the marriage is based on the ‘‘transient’’ contemporary lifestyle. To stay (geographically) she has to leave (relationship-wise). She is as confused as the scientists. To be a resident or a transient, that is the question—for cats and for Mary. The story takes place during an interlude of avoiding that inevitable decision.

Like the cats, the board game Monopoly symbolically renders the tension between wandering and putting down roots. As a symbol, Monopoly aptly combines the idea of aimless meandering with the world of financial investing, mortgage strategies, and getting ahead by ‘‘playing the game.’’ Mason reserves her sharpest satire in the story for the idea of money management, having Mary recall a session with a financial counselor who used terminology like ‘‘fluid assets’’ and investment ‘‘postures that will maximize your potential.’’ The words remind her of a weird sex therapist’s advice.

The Monopoly game is the subtext of an evening Larry and Mary spend together, the same one in which they have their cat discussion. It is a curious thing for new lovers to be doing; in a sense the game is taking the place of intimacy for them, just as financial talk substitutes for intimacy between Mary and her husband Stephen. Their long distance calls are mostly about money and/or their new house in Louisville. (It should be noted here that the use of the common brand name game is also a good example of the popular culture many critics have noted as a conspicuous feature of Mason’s work.)

While the cats and the Monopoly game subtly symbolize the tension Mary feels between following her husband to Louisville and staying with her lover in the country, the wounded rabbit she sees in the road is a blatant and dramatic representation of this conflict. It is an example of what fellow writer Raymond Carver (in the jacket notes to Shiloh and Other Stories) called the ‘‘aftereffect image’’ in Mason’s fiction—her tendency to create images that, long after one has finished the story, burn in the mind as a vivid and disturbing pictures. Rabbits are mentioned casually earlier in the story—dead ones the cats bring in. Yet in this scene Mary is traumatized by what she sees. As she and Larry are driving back from a restaurant they come across a rabbit that has been hit. ‘‘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.’’

This image is the closest thing to a climax in this story that, for the most part, carefully avoids the dramatic. The sight of the mangled creature sends Mary into a fit of hysterics. She is inconsolable, and when her husband calls and her lover answers the phone, her whole indecision comes to an abrupt end. Trying to deflect her husband’s suspicion about Larry, she hurriedly commits to coming to Louisville, ostensibly ending her affair. In a clever punning reference to the farmhouse felines, Mary says she will have to swear to Stephen ‘‘on a stack of cats’’ that nothing sexual is going on. As she and Stephen discuss her ‘‘attachment to place’’ and her ‘‘need to be flexible,’’ Mary finds herself nervously tearing up the Monopoly money she holds in her hands.

Mary has not really resolved her quandary, and her frantic need to do something is both triggered and epitomized by the grisly rabbit image—she sees herself as a helpless creature who is hurt, confused, stuck and immobile, but frantically attempting to move. Mason deftly converges the story’s symbols here—the cats, Monopoly, and the dying rabbit— and then closes with another striking visual image, the night glow of one of her cats’ eyes that appear as one red and one green. Both small animal ‘‘aftereffect images’’ combine to make Mary realize the depth of her inner conflict. She thinks of the red and green glow in the cat’s eyes as mixed signals from a traffic light, an objective correlative of her indecision.

Mason’s artistic achievement in this story lies in her ability to draw such memorable images and symbols out of the mundane stuff of everyday life— cats, board games, and road-kill. But the tone of the story also adds to its success. The flat, emotionless affect of her narrator creates an ambiguity between what is being said and how it is being said. In the mangled rabbit episode, for example, she states that she becomes hysterical. But the reader is never privy to that level of emotion. It is as if the hysteria is happening a long way off. Another example is in the previously mentioned first sentence. Mary says she is cheating on her husband, but she says it as if it were something interesting she read in the newspaper.

Mason has discussed this aspect of her style in an interview in Contemporary Literature. ‘‘I try to approximate language that’s very blunt and Anglo- Saxon. A lot of this is not just meaning but the sound of the words and the rhythm of the words’’ (Contemporary Literature, 32, [1991]). Note the phrase ‘‘not just meaning’’ here; that indicates that to Mason, meaning is part of the intent of this style. The flat, ‘‘just the facts’’ tone of the narrator produces an aura of numbness. One gets the impression Mary is in a kind of shock, like the mangled rabbit, and that she has ironically separated herself from her own existence. Her experience of college is termed ‘‘higher learning.’’ When Larry asks if she is bored with him and if he should stop coming to see her, her answer is ‘‘I don’t know.’’

Many critics have noted Mason’s use of rock and roll as a reference in her stories, but in ‘‘Residents and Transients’’ she makes one of her rare references to formal literature. The poem the narrator thinks of, but characteristically cannot recall the name of, is Dylan Thomas’s ‘‘Fern Hill,’’ a beautiful lyric of nostalgia for Thomas’s Welsh childhood before he realized the fleeting nature of life and joy. Mary is also nostalgic for her lost past, but she is ironic and arch rather than lyrical about it. Another poetic Dylan, Bob, has penned a line that fits Mary’s attitude better than the Welshman’s. Dylan’s song, ‘‘The Man in the Long Black Coat,’’ which coincidentally is also about infidelity, has a line that fits Mary’s character to a tee—‘‘people don’t live or die, people just float.’’ And it is the flat voicing Mason gives her narrator that so effectively conveys this mood.

Source: Thomas E. Barden, ‘‘Symbol and Voice in Bobbie Ann Mason’s ‘Residents and Transients,’’’ for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000. Barden is Professor of American Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Toledo.

Bobby Ann Mason is a Southern writer known for her stories that express a strong sense of place. ‘‘Residents and Transients,’’ as the title suggests, is about a woman who is torn between her attachment to her hometown and family farmhouse, where she has been a ‘‘resident’’ most of her life, and her attachment to her marriage, which necessitates a ‘‘transient’’ lifestyle, as her husband’s job requires that they move every few years.

On one level, Mary, the narrator, is torn between the two men in her life, her husband and her lover. At a deeper level, however, each man is associated with Mary’s two choices: her lover, Larry, is associated with remaining a ‘‘resident’’ in her home town, while her husband, Stephen, is associated with the ‘‘transient’’ life that comes with his job. At the story’s opening, Stephen has gone to Louisville, Kentucky, where he has recently been transferred, to look for a new house.

Mary’s attachment to Larry is based on his associations with her hometown, family farmhouse, and childhood memories. The two grew up together, he has never moved out of town (and never will), and he even calls her by her childhood name, ‘‘Mary Sue.’’ Larry appeals to Mary’s sense of home because he wants her to stay there with him. ‘‘‘You shouldn’t go to Louisville,’ he pleads. ‘This part of Kentucky is the prettiest. I wouldn’t change it for anything.’’’ This deep-rooted attachment to place is also characteristic of the town’s residents: ‘‘Most people around here would rather die than leave town.’’

Mary’s attachment to her husband, Stephen, on the other hand, necessitates a more ‘‘mobile,’’ ‘‘flexible’’ and modern lifestyle in which one doesn’t develop any great attachment to a particular location, but is willing to pick up and move anywhere in pursuit of better professional and financial opportunities. His job requires ‘‘frequent transfers,’’ from one location to another. Mary even describes him as one of the Yankee outsiders, from the North, who have begun to ‘‘invade’’ her community. This ‘‘invasion’’ of the town represents an element of change which threatens to outmode its rustic, ‘‘provincial’’ Southern character. Mary explains that this change ‘‘disturbs the native residents,’’ herself included.

In the opening paragraph, Mary expresses her strong desire to be a ‘‘resident,’’ to stay where she is, in her family farmhouse, in her hometown. ‘‘I do not want to go to Louisville. I do not want to go anywhere.’’ A considerable amount of the story is taken up with Mary’s loving descriptions of the land and the house. There is a strong sense of nostalgia —a longing for, or clinging to, fond memories of a past that is quickly slipping way—in these descriptions. For instance, Mary’s description of the farmhouse is rich with majesty and affection: ‘‘I love its stateliness, the way it rises up from the fields like a patch of mutant jimsonweeds.’’ The evidence of decay in Mary’s description further expresses a strong sense of nostalgia: ‘‘I’m fond of the old white wood siding, the sagging outbuildings.’’

Mary’s attachment to her family home even focuses on particular rooms of the house which evoke images of a simpler, more traditional lifestyle. Her description of the ‘‘canning kitchen’’ ties her nostalgia for the house to associations with childhood memories of her mother’s old-fashioned home cooking: ‘‘The canning kitchen was my mother’s pride. There, she processed her green beans twenty minutes in a pressure canner, and her tomato juice fifteen minutes in a water bath.’’

Even the view from the canning kitchen is described in panoramic beauty.

From the canning kitchen, Larry and I have a good view of the cornfields. A cross-breeze makes this the coolest and most pleasant place to be. The house is in the center of the cornfields, and a dirt lane leads out to the road, about half a mile away.

The great sense of loss Mary feels in seeing even her parents let go of this traditional, rural lifestyle is particularly poignant. Mary’s rich associations with her mother’s practice of canning her own food is exchanged for the empty, modern practice of grocery shopping: ‘‘Now my mother lives in a mobile home. In her letters she tells me all the prices of the foods she buys.’’

Yet Mary’s husband expects her to leave this countryside, rich with association, in order to live in a neighborhood that she disdainfully describes as having other ‘‘houses within view.’’ Stephen’s description of the new house he has picked out for them in Louisville only intensifies her distaste for modern homes. He describes it as ‘‘a three-bedroom brick with a two-car garage, finished basement, dining alcove, patio-’’

‘‘Does it have a canning kitchen?’’ I want to know. Stephen laughs. ‘‘No, but it has a rec room.’’ I quake at the thought of a rec room.

Mary clings nostalgically not just to the land and the house, but to many of the objects associated with farm life.

‘‘This place is full of junk that no one could throw away,’’ I say distractedly, I’m thinking of the boxes in the attic, the rusted tools in the barn. In a cabinet in the canning kitchen I found some Bag Balm, antiseptic salve to soften cows’ udders.

When she and Larry are eating at a cheap diner one night, Mary notices a ‘‘framed arrangement of farm tools’’ hanging on the restaurant wall for decoration. ‘‘Other objects—saw handles, scythes pulleys—were mounted on wood like fish trophies.’’ The fact that these farm tools have been framed and hung up on a wall for decoration indicates that they no longer function as tools, but have become artifacts— remnants of a past way of life no longer useful in the modern world. It’s as if they’ve become museum pieces. Mary is immediately reminded of the tools left in the barn of her family farmhouse, and wonders what they ‘‘would look like on the wall of a restaurant.’’ By making this connection between the framed tools on the wall and her father’s old tools at home, Mary is faced with acknowledging that the way of life she is clinging to is outdated, a historical relic, no longer a viable option for her in the modern world.

Mary’s husband, Stephen, looks down on Mary’s attachment to her hometown, telling her it is outdated. ‘‘Those attachments to place are so provincial,’’ he tells her. The word ‘‘provincial’’ suggests a small-town, ignorant, behind-the-times outlook on the world. He chides Mary for not having a more modern, up-to-date attitude: ‘‘Listen, Mary, you’ve got to be more open to the way things are,’’ he tells her. Rather than a traditional, old-fashioned, smalltown attitude, Stephen tells her she needs to develop a modern, detached attitude toward where and how she wants to live: ‘‘You’ve got to be more flexible,’’ he says.

Even Mary’s parents seem to have let go of their home town and family farmhouse in pursuit of a more modern, less rustic, lifestyle. The mobile home in which they are living suggests both a temporary residence and the idea of mobility, which suggests a lack of attachment to any particular location. Furthermore, ‘‘their minds are on the condominium they are planning to buy when this farm is sold.’’ Yet Mary’s sentiments are the opposite of her parents. ‘‘Now they have moved to Florida, but I have stayed here, wondering why I ever went away.’’

The title of this story, ‘‘Residents and Transients,’’ refers literally to Mary’s explanation of the ‘‘two kinds of cats’’ that live in the wild, ‘‘residents and transients.’’ As the central metaphor of the story, Mary’s discussion of these ‘‘two kinds of cats’’ provides a key to understanding her fundamental struggles. Interpreting the cats as metaphors allows for an interpretation of the distinction between ‘‘residents’’ and ‘‘transients’’ as applying to two kinds of people: ‘‘Some stay put, in their fixed home ranges, and others are on the move. They don’t have real homes.’’

Mary’s dilemma is whether or not to ‘‘stay put’’ in her childhood home, her ‘‘fixed home range,’’ or follow her husband, who is always ‘‘on the move,’’ and has no ‘‘real’’ home. As Mary goes on to discuss these distinctions, she expresses her ambivalence as to whether ‘‘staying put’’ is or isn’t really a better option than being ‘‘on the move.’’

‘‘Everybody always thought that the ones who establish the territories are the most successful. They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums and losers.’’

Mary’s description of the ‘‘resident’’ cats characterizes what people used to think was the better, more ‘‘successful’’ way to live—to spend one’s whole life in one’s home town, maintaining a strong attachment to the land. Likewise, a more traditional attitude maintains the perspective that ‘‘transients’’ are ‘‘bums and losers.’’ But, again, applying Mary’s description to human beings, one can see that the uncertainty of today’s ‘‘scientists’’ as to which type of cat is superior is again an expression of Mary’s confusion as to which type of lifestyle is better for her.

‘‘The thing is—this is what the scientists are wondering about now—it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence.’’

Mary ends this explanation with the conclusion that the scientists ‘‘can’t decide’’ which type of cat is superior. Again, it is Mary herself who ‘‘can’t decide’’ whether to stay where she is or to move on with her husband. In response, Larry inadvertently adds to this metaphor by responding that, ‘‘none of this is true of domestic cats.’’ As it is clear that Mary is, by nature, a ‘‘domestic cat,’’ Larry’s comment that they are ‘‘all screwed up’’ is again indicative of Mary’s feelings of being ‘‘all screwed up’’ by her out-dated attachment to the small town farm life of her childhood.

Mary’s connection to the cats is indicated in other ways, as well. She even inadvertently categorizes herself as a cat: ‘‘One day I was counting the cats and I absentmindedly counted myself.’’ One night she hears a cat, not one of hers, yowling outside her house. ‘‘There’s nothing so mournful as the yowling of a homeless cat,’’ she says. Mary herself fears becoming like a ‘‘homeless cat’’ if she loses her family home. In some ways, Mary’s story is like the mournful ‘‘yowling of a homeless cat,’’ an expression of her own mourning over the impending loss of her childhood home, and the sense of homelessness it will bring.

A disturbing image toward the end of the story serves as a metaphor by which Mary comes closer to an understanding of the nature of her dilemma. Driving home one night with Larry, Mary notices a rabbit at the side of the road.

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.

Like Mary, the rabbit is stuck in one place, its ‘‘forelegs are frantically working,’’ an image which resonates with Mary’s ‘‘frantic’’ efforts at moving forward into her future. Yet, despite this effort, the rabbit remains where it is, ‘‘running in place.’’ In other words, it is as if Mary were going through the motions of preparing to move to a new house in Louisville with her husband, yet, for all her efforts, remains stuck in the old house, as if ‘‘running in place.’’ Furthermore, the rabbit’s back legs have been smashed, so that it is stuck in the road, and cannot move at all. Again, as a metaphor, this correlates with Mary’s situation, as her ‘‘back legs,’’ or her childhood memories of her home town, have been permanently damaged, in terms of being a part of a past she will never be able to recover. Yet, the sense of emotional loss she feels in clinging to this past leaves Mary, like the rabbit, in a state of agony and unable to move forward.

Source: Liz Brent, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000. Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, with a specialization in American cinema, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer/editor and film critic and teaches courses in American cinema.

Much has been written about the loss of identity experienced by the characters of Bobbie Ann Mason’s short stories; the people of Shiloh and Other Stories in particular seem to be confused by the onslaught of pop culture, the media, and other forces of social change. The males, perhaps, seem the more affected, and more ineffectual in their attempts to seize or to create some new center for their lives. The women, at least most of them, react to their frustration and discontent more forcefully; they are or become downhome feminists, and the degree of their feminist responses within their culture is largely determined by education, by economic empowerment, and by age, or by some combination of the three.

Almost all of Mason’s characters come from the rural poor. This is not to say they are poor, either in a strict financial or cultural sense. The older characters, survivors of the deprivations of the Great Depression, have jobs that afford them a comfortable if not luxurious lifestyle; some, like Bill, the retired farmer of ‘‘The Ocean,’’ can even afford a ‘‘big camper cruiser,’’ which he proudly captains around the backwaters of America even if it is a far cry from the destroyer he served on as a youth during World War II.

The culture of Western Kentucky, although unsophisticated in comparison to the big cities of the East, where so many of the more ambitious characters go, has a solidity, a sophistication even, of its own. In ‘‘Nancy Culpepper,’’ the main character, a woman who had fled the unpromising life of her Kentucky youth only to return years later, hears her mother say, ‘‘We’ll never go anywhere. We’ve got our dress tail on a bedpost.’’ Puzzled, Nancy asks her mother the meaning of the expression. Her mother gives it, adding, ‘‘I guess you think we’re just ignorant . . . The way we talk.’’ Nancy responds, ‘‘No, I don’t.’’ And she doesn’t, because this folksy saying is exactly one of the little things that richly differentiate her culture, a culture she once dismissed as backward but now the source of an irresistible longing. (She has used the impending move of her grandmother into a nursing home to justify her visiting her relatives, but she is aware this is really an excuse to test her vague desire to move back to Kentucky.)

It is important to see that the downhome feminists of these stories do not want what their city cousins want: equal legal and political rights, equal access to careers, equal pay, government support of child care, and so on. Mason’s women simply want breathing space in their relationships with their men. Sometimes only divorce, always initiated by the women, will provide the degree of change these women seek but sometimes their assertiveness merely aims for a change of pace—casual adultery, for example.

The culture of Mason’s Western Kentucky is focused on the lower class, defined by a general lack of higher education, by consumer taste, and, increasingly, by choice of leisure activity. Mason’s characters have enough discretionary income to buy such big-ticket items as campers and organs, and enough time to take continuing education classes, or, in the case of Shelby, the preacher in ‘‘The Retreat,’’ even the flexibility to follow an avocation which does not support him and his family (he is an electrician during the week). . . .

The most educated women in the book follow a decidely different path in their relationship with their men. Their problems are not as dramatic as their lesser-educated counterparts and their solutions are more ambivalent. Nancy Culpepper was married in 1967 in Massachusetts, where she had gone for graduate school. Her husband, Jack, a Yankee, set up his photography business near Philadelphia after the wedding. Nancy’s marriage has produced both a son and relative happiness yet she can’t shake a longing for her Kentucky roots, which, to her consternation, were on her mind even during her wedding night. After the ceremony Jack takes Nancy outside to look for the northern lights. She searches the sky diligently but she ‘‘kept thinking of her parents at home, probably watching Gunsmoke.’’ The Joy of Cooking, a wedding gift, makes her wonder what her parents are eating at that very moment. Clumsily, she dances with Jack to a Beatles album. There are no stopping places in the songs and this upsets her: ‘‘She was crying. ‘Songs used to have stopping places in between.’’’

When Nancy learns that she had an ancestor also named Nancy Culpepper, she begins to go by her maiden name. A few years later she insists on visiting Kentucky to help her parents with her invalid grandmother and to look for some lost pictures belonging to her grandmother. Nancy hopes some of the pictures will be of her namesake. This is the catalyst Nancy has been waiting for because lately she had ‘‘been vaguely wanting to move to Kentucky.’’ Thus her feminist search for identity is curiously, even atavistically linked to a search for roots. She is willing to put a strain on her immediate family in conducting this search: both her husband and her son resent her staying away so long. During a telephone conversation Jack says, ‘‘We’re your family too.’’ And her son hangs up without saying goodbye, much to Nancy’s distress; moreover, neither husband nor son wants to move to Kentucky.

At the end of the story, the grandmother’s photo album is found but the grandmother and Nancy’s mother disagree on which person in a group picture is the original Nancy Culpepper. The confusion surrounding the identity of the original Nancy perfectly reflects the confusion of identity of the contemporary Nancy. The ending, with Nancy staring both at the woman her grandmother had thought was Nancy’s ancestor and at the woman’s husband, emphasizes the ambivalence of Nancy’s situation:

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.

At that moment Nancy’s own husband is far away and he is as uncertain as the reader about Nancy’s next move.

The main character of ‘‘Residents and Transients,’’ the first-person narrator, has many things in common with Nancy Culpepper. She, too, left Kentucky for ‘‘higher learning,’’ which in her case took eight years. She also came back to Kentucky on a family matter, specifically because her parents were in poor health. Even after her parents are recovered and moved to Florida and even though she admits she feels like an outsider, the narrator has stayed on because, like Nancy, she felt the tug of her roots. Or, as she puts it, . . . I have stayed here, wondering why I ever went away.’’ And she has a Yankee husband, whom she met when he was transferred by his company into the area.

This woman’s story is that she is bored in the absence of her husband, who has been transferred again, to Louisville. He is looking for a house there, while she remains on the farm to oversee the auction of household goods for her parents when the farm is sold. She has taken a lover, her dentist, Larry. That she has been unfaithful to her husband sets her apart from Norma Jean and the others. Although she is somewhat surprised at her behavior, she has the air of a big-city sophisticate, a woman who does what she wants, including what some men have done all along: have a satisfying affair and a satisfying marriage at the same time. The key to her attitude is revealed in a lecture she delivers to Larry about cats:

‘‘In the wild, there are two kinds of cat populations,’’ I tell him when he finishes his move. ‘‘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 the territories are the most successful—like the capitalists who get ahold of Park Place.’’. . . ‘‘They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums, the losers.’’ ‘‘The thing is—this is what the scientists are wondering about now—it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence. They can’t decide.’’

The narrator decides that she misses her husband and that she is going to join him in Louisville. However, one gathers, she would be just as happy without him. The risks she takes while having her fling—going out to dinner with Larry where she may be recognized, even allowing Larry to answer her phone—illustrate confidence, a sense of her own superiority. Her identifying with the transient cats is made explicit in the last five lines of the story:

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. It is Brenda, my odd-eyed cat. Her blue eye shines red and her yellow eye shines green. In a moment I realize that I am waiting for the light to change.

She is a transient and transients are just as likely to leave mates as they are to leave territories.

Bobbie Ann Mason has an uncanny ability to capture the state of mind of the women of rural Western Kentucky in the 1970s. As that culture becomes more homogenized, more integrated with the general American culture, these women will lose their special identity and their special problems. They will become more like Nancy Culpepper and the narrator of ‘‘Residents and Transients’’ as they become better educated and more economically independent. They will have more complex relationships with their men and families; their lives will be more refined, more introspective—and the trade-off in vigor and earthiness may leave them far less interesting.

Source: G. O. Morphew, ‘‘Downhome Feminists in ‘Shiloh’ and Other Stories,’’ in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 41–49.

‘‘Old Things’’ demonstrates most poignantly the authority of the past in Mason’s world. Cleo Watkins is perplexed by the modern predilection for antiques, for she ‘‘has spent years trying to get rid of things she has collected. . . . She doesn’t want to live in the past.’’ Cleo does not perceive that her avoidance of life, her discontent with contemporary society, anchor her in a past that no longer exists. ‘‘Kids never seem to care about anything anymore,’’ she reflects bitterly when her grandchildren act oblivious to their cluttered surroundings, and ‘‘she has put a chain on the door, because young people are going wild, breaking in on defenseless older women.’’ Cleo envies a friend who has just taken a trip out West but maintains that she could not ‘‘take off like that’’ because ‘‘now there are too many maniacs on the road.’’

Although she declares that ‘‘there’s no use trying to hang on to anything. You just lose it all in the end. You might as well not care,’’ the story’s denouement teaches Cleo that some of the past cannot—and should not—be forgotten. At a flea market, amidst the Depression glass and rusty farm tools, she spots a familiar object, a miniature whatnot in which her husband used to keep his stamps and receipts. At the sight of the small box, with its drawers that form a scene of a train running through the meadow, Cleo’s ‘‘blood is rushing to her head and her stomach is churning.’’ As the story ends, she pays three dollars (too much) for the piece and, looking at the train, imagines that her happy family is aboard, crossing the valley, heading West: ‘‘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.’’ Although the past offers quiet solace from the hectic pace of modern life, Mason is aware of the dangers of ignoring the inexorable changes of society. Cleo, with her refusal to adapt to contemporary culture, personifies another Mason theme—the inordinate fear of life in this strange new world. At fifty-two Cleo feels and acts like an old woman; ‘‘everything seems to distress her, she notices.’’ Mack Skaggs is also relatively young (in his late forties), but his agoraphobia and his ineffectual attempts to keep up with his college-student daughter (he struggles with The Encyclopedia of Philosophy only to discover that she is studying physics) are the pathetic actions and attitudes of a man completely overwhelmed by the world around him. In ‘‘Still Life with Watermelon,’’ Louise’s husband goes off to Texas without her because, he claims, she is ‘‘afraid to try new things.’’ She is initially angry at his accusations and his wanderlust, but at his return her feelings change. ‘‘Something about the conflicting impulses of men and women has gotten twisted around, she feels. 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, Louise has read.’’

Mary, in ‘‘Residents and Transients,’’ has, unlike most of these characters, experimented with various lifestyles, but she has returned to her roots in Kentucky. Now, although her husband has been transferred and has moved to the city to work and find them a home, she stays behind because, she says, ‘‘I do not want to go anywhere.’’ Mary loves her parents’ old farmhouse and worries about a world that sends her mother off to live in a mobile home in Florida. She knows that her mother, who loved her canning kitchen, would be appalled to find that her daughter has taken a lover and spends her afternoons with him drinking Bloody Marys made with the old woman’s canned tomato juice. An obviously more educated and sophisticated woman than many of her neighbors in these stories, Mary too is torn between the serene seductions of an obsolete lifestyle and the intimidating uncertainties of a variable present and future. Eventually she recognizes the dangers of stasis: ‘‘I am nearly thirty years old,’’ she proclaims. ‘‘I have two men, eight cats, no cavities. One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.’’ Near the end of the story Mary relates to her lover the perception that will ultimately send her—however reluctantly—to Louisville and a new life with her husband:

‘‘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 the territories are the most successful. . . . They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums, the losers . . . The thing is—this is what the scientists are wondering about now—it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence. They can’t decide. . . . When certain Indians got tired of living in a place—when they used up the soil, or the garbage pile got too high—they moved on to the next place.’’

Bobbie Ann Mason’s Kentucky is paradigmatic of the contemporary South, and to an extent of modern America. Overwhelmed by rapid and frightening changes in their lives, her characters and her readers must confront contradictory impulses, the temptation to withdraw into the security of home and the past, and the alternative prospect of taking to the road in search of something better. There are no easy answers, Mason tells us, a fact that makes her stories all the more satisfying. They are small stopping places, brief, refreshing respites from a complex world.

Source: Maureen Ryan, ‘‘Stopping Places: Bobbie Ann Mason’s Short Stories,’’ in Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, University Press of Mississippi, 1984, pp. 283–94.